People may remember Tai Lopez from his "Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here" YouTube ad, subject of several parodies such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIwTG8V-Ko
I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing. I know nothing else about him and I hope to keep it that way.
He also ran a series of now-defunct scam dating sites with fake profiles around 2010-2015, and has been quite consistent at only operating scam businesses in the past 15 years. I know nothing about the people who hand over money to this guy, and I hope to keep it that way.
> For example, to entice individuals to invest in their acquisitions, they said their portfolio companies were "on fire" and that "cash flow is strong."
Clearly if someone tells you their stonks are "on fire" that's all the due diligence you need to do as a buyer. Some people just really deeply believe that there exist risk-free get-rich-quick schemes.
I find it difficult not to do at least a little bit of victim blaming here...
What is a "scam dating site"? A site where AI-driven profiles you contact with, phish or socially-engineer your money out of you? That probably couldn't happen in 2015 let alone 2010, AI tech wasn't yet there.
If you mean just a "dating site where all female profiles are fake, generated by site itself", then well, it's just called a "dating site".
Whole dating sites industry - with hundreds if not thousands of companies, downstream industries providing them traffic, payments, and services of all kinds, industry associations, conferences, rich networking and whatnot - is doing just that. Always did. The few "real" dating apps/sites like Tinder are just a tip of the iceberg - no one tries to really imitate them - it's not possible.
Almost everything viable on the Internet today, is a "scam" in this (to my taste, extremely strict and old-fashioned, definition). Just because all available real attention has already been harvested a long time ago, and cost of traffic, which is extremely high now because extensive way of attracting it - by having people spend more time at the screen - is no longer available as people already spend glued to the screens all day - so every time to have them visit your site you have to pay more than the other guy pays to have them visit theirs - it's an auction and prices are through the roof.
Thus, if you sell people something which isn't fake, you aren't going to turn a profit. So all who did, are out of business - with the exception of yes, "big tech" monopolies that can exploit the shit out of people in a way no run of the mill scammer like those two poor hapless chaps can even dream of.
> A site where AI-driven profiles you contact with, phish or socially-engineer your money out of you? That probably couldn't happen in 2015 let alone 2010, AI tech wasn't yet there.
Why do you think you need AI for this? You don't even need Indians for this, Americans will do it. I remember someone showing me a site a couple years ago that recruited for the job, and there was a Reddit where they talked about working it and how the rates paid were changing.
In a manual mode these days it certainly can't work. People are no longer that gullible. But to think, in 2010 it likely could! So that could be a thing.
It still works in manual mode and it is still mostly done manually, despite AI. This is the "chat" model powering 6 billion dollars of annual OnlyFans revenue and billions of dollars to dating sites advertising "girls in your area" on porn sites. Armies of mostly Filipino chatters pretend to be women and do what is essentially a soft romance scam.
Governments have essentially never looked into it, despite it having gone on uninhibited for 20+ years and at the scale of billions annually for at least 16+ years.
Fun fact: outside of the Anglosphere it's mostly people who pretend to be men, siphoning money off lonely women. Typical fake profile is a handsome American colonel deployed to Iraq (i met several women who flirted with "him" lmao), that was like, 10 years ago.
Uhh that's just every dating site since at least the 2000s.
They didn't need LLMs to build bots.
Ashley Madison for example was 10 bots for every one real woman or something absurd.
If you need something more sophisticated than basic template based bots (which always worked just fine, your marks are uh, not exactly the most observant people and really really really want to believe the pretty girl likes them), then it is probably still cheaper to run a literal slave operation in some South Asian state than pay per token.
Creating fake profiles for a dating site is basically what the Reddit founders did to create Reddit. It’s no more ethically compromised than what many YC companies do.
The ones that get labeled as scams are just the ones that executed poorly
Many if not most scam companies scam the consumer, which is indistinguishable from profiting off a consumer.
There are also many “legitimate” tech companies that don’t make any profit, but balloon their valuation all the way to an IPO or SPAC and then profit off public investors.
So your definition still can’t distinguish between “real” companies and scam companies
> I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing.
I'm struggling to understand what this means. He put lots of ads on his videos? Or something else.
He would pay to have his videos as ads on other people’s videos.
E.g., I’d go to watch a video of SmarterEveryDay, and Tai Lopez would show up as an ad, telling me all about his Lamborghinis and bookshelves of books he’d never read. And people would just watch the full ad, even after they could’ve skipped (5s).
This is an example of the fact that while only 1% would watch the whole thing, they just raised their hands as the marks, to be worked on through the whole funnel.
There are armies of bad parents or babysitters that just hand baby an Ipad, not on child or restricted mode, and just let youtube literally Clockwork Orange a human being.
It's not against YouTube's ToS to run pre-roll ads of any length, of course. But I think he was just selling get-rich-quick schemes or something. At the time YouTube ads were more rare and generally short, like 15 second TV commercials, so it was weird to see long-form content as ads. He absolutely saturated the site with this ad for a while to the point that it became a meme. I'm guessing a significant percentage of YouTube's user base at the time was served that ad at least once.
Reminds me of Todrick Hall who gave a "tour of the $7 million house he just bought, OMG can't believe I'm a home owner in Beverly Hills!" on his youtube channel then got evicted for unpaid rent and sued for $100k of back-owed rent money. https://people.com/home/todrick-hall-ordered-to-pay-100k-in-...
I never saw his videos but his name still came up a lot as a know scammer in many forums. He was prolific in his reach toward vulnerable populations who were desperate to get rich quickly. There are a lot of young people who feel that their only chance at having a decent life is to strike it rich from something big. People like this person prey on those thoughts.
> There are a lot of young people who feel that their only chance at having a decent life is to strike it rich from something big.
Yup. It was bad enough 10 years ago, but now... IMHO the despair has gone exponentially worse. On one side, you got big name YouTubers/Twitch/Kick streamers getting absurdly large deals to shill VPNs and supplements of questionable utility and safety, then for young women you got OnlyFans and its various copycats with excesses like Lil Tay making 1 M$ in 24 hours after turning 18 (problematic in itself - it seems like almost every female child/juvie actor has to cope with absolute weirdos doing countdowns to when they "turn legal").
And on the other side you get an entire generation of people who know that they will never even have the chance to own a home even if they work their entire life.
As this is a tech forum, I expect that the name that stands out is Radio Shack, and I do agree that that story is tragic. For me, as a long time New Yorker, the other name that stands out is Modell's. They were, for quite a long time, a fixture in New York City and beyond. Even for us not sports inclined, we still knew Modell's as a reliable retailer of sneakers throughout the years. Arguably, their Covid era bankruptcy was already the end, and this was just private equity puppeting the corpse. Nevertheless, it's a sad and nostalgic story.
I thought you were going to say Pier 1 instead. Because I was scammed into buying wicker furniture circa 1994, I’m not surprised pier 1 is continuing buying a legacy of scams.
Circa 2010, I met Tai and he wanted some work done for his portfolio of dating websites he had back then. (He had a whole bunch of them targeted to various ethnic groups, religious subgroups and so on.)
It became apparent that (a) he had a huge pile of messy PHP, WordPress-based sites, and then (b) expressed contempt for paying $35 an hour for programmers since his opinion was you could get programmers in the third world for $5 an hour. He negotiated me down to $25. I ended up declining.
Like many people who crow about how they’re a “millionaire”, when it came time to show the money, he was suddenly really concerned about very small amounts of money here and there.
Never met him personally, but one of his companies tried to recruit me for a database migration project. Part of the interview process included responding to the question "I enjoy having sex with people I hardly know" on a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
Lately he has been promoting “AI automation agency” course.
He says anyone can label themselves “AI automation expert” and charge thousands of dollars for it, then just use vibe coding tools to do the job or outsource it.
It is kind of fundamental to the nature of bubbles that near their peak they tend to feature more traditional investors backing ventures that in any other context everyone with any common sense would stay away from because the ratio of scam red flags to rational bases for believing it was a good investment are too high.
Quite. Sounds as much like Builder.AI, the London startup where AI genuinely did stand for "actually Indians", as it does Amazon Go, whose pick-and-go stores had their cameras monitored by people in India to ensure it all worked as they said it did.
I don't know Tai Lopez and he seems like an asshole based on his public persona but I think you'd be surprised by the number of (especially first generation) millionaires who will negotiate over pennies. The easiest way to have a lot of money is to earn a lot and not spend a lot.
A friend is in commercial real estate. If you own office or warehouse space, he finds you a company to rent the space, and help negotiate the deal. Then after the deal is done, the (very wealthy) building owner often will try to re-negotiate down the agreed to fee, or say he'll pay it in four years. The guy works for 6 months getting the deal done, is supposed to get like $25K, then the wealthy building owner says he'll give him $10K and will pay over 4 years. Crazy business.
Earning a lot does the heavy lifting here (and rent of various kinds does the heavily lifting of that in turn). It's far, far easier to be "frugal" in % of your income when your income is high.
People like this Tai guy pay a premium for screwing people over, they pretty clearly could have made more money, more safely, if they didn't love the feeling of getting one up on you. That explains their attitude better than some virtue of frugality.
Having money allows you to spend time elsewhere, like cherry picking desperate employees. I know temp agencies that have it as the whole business model. If you aren't desperate you don't fit.
A study found that most American millionaires lived in modest homes and drove used American cars. They made their wealth by being concerned about relatively small amounts of money because it adds up. When we think "millionaire" we think of the dream that is sold to us by Hollywood—mansions, fancy cars, endless parties. But entertainers are paid in the millions and then encouraged to live like billionaires, so that they're desperate enough to continue being slaves to the entertainment-industrial complex to keep the gravy train going.
But $35/hr was a pittance for a programmer even in 2010. Tai Lopez is a gigantic tool for cheaping out on that.
I think the point is someone who has 500k after a lifetime of putting money in a 401k along with 600k in home equity is not the same as someone who lives in a mansion and has a few exotic cars.
Tai posed as the latter, so suddenly caring about $35 an hour is very suspicious.
Precisely. It’s quite funny how any time this comes up - a person of dubious wealth who claims to be rich being a penny-pincher - people are quick to chime in with something implying they got rich by doing that. It’s like the inverse of the whole “maybe if you didn’t eat avocado toast you’d afford that $500k house…” thing
I'd be interested to know what proportion of these millionnaires' net worth came from inheritances. That's the real dream Hollywood never tells you about.
Probably not as much as you probably think. Most "millionaires" today are just boomers from working class backgrounds who bought a modest property back in the 70s and now 50 years later all their illiquid assets, primarily their property, can be added up to one or two million.
> Basically, your net worth is total asset minus your primary residence.
Net worth includes equity in your primary residence. That is the value of the property minus outstanding mortgage amount.
There are some investment scenarios where net worth is calculated minus primary residence, but those are specialty cases that are explicitly called out.
Well actors have a very strong union in the US, they used to be paid peanuts. When you have that kind of labor power, your security comes from the union, not your stored wealth, so they can afford to spend because they know they will be well compensated for their work.
There is no security. The actors' unions set minimum wages for union productions. But they don't guarantee work to anyone, and many productions are non-union. Every experienced actor is aware that they might never get another role.
Acting is notorious for being a bad career choice, and the small fraction of actors who become wealthy through acting do so because of the structure of the market for entertainment (namely, fame sells tickets, so the employers of entertainers all want to hire already-famous entertainers, making it very difficult for unknown entertainers to become famous, which is necessary to start earning good money), not because of anything to do with any union.
Since ancient times, acting and prostitution have been considered closely related industries and I think this probably never changed. The actors who "make it big" are the ones that win favors with producers one way or another, probably in many cases by sating their perverted desires. Some of this was revealed in #MeToo cases, like all the Weinstein stuff.
If they are found guilty, their company will get fined, they will still be rich.
This will keep happening unless you a) take back their personal wealth and return it to investors and b) put them in jail & c) black list them from holding office at a corporation in the future.
No, it is still fraud, even if your fraudelent actions ended up making the investors/company money. And it will land you in prison.
This is exactly what Martin Shkreli spent his time in prison for (and not for anything related to Daraprim drug price increases, despite what some people apparently believe, as I discovered).
TLDR (with a great deal of oversimplification): he ran a hedge fund (MSMB) and was lying to investors about how much money the fund had and about the investment strategies. He then started a pharma company called Retrophin and used some of his equity in Retrophin to compensate the MSMB investors for their losses (without their knowledge, i.e., basically the exact same issue with lying about investment strategies to investors he had earlier). It just so happened that Retrophin ended up performing fairly well at the time, and that equity actually ended up making profit for those investors overall.
Investors/company making money in the end is not a valid defense against fraud charges. If a hedge fund manager or a CEO cashes out the investor/company accounts in secret, goes to Vegas to place it all on red, makes a gain, and then puts it back into the investor/company account, it is still a crime. Despite the fact that the investors/company made money in the end, I don’t think it is wrong to call this a fraudelent move.
However, the wheels of justice tend to be slow, and it might take some time for the consequences to catch up. Those fraudelent actions on Shkreli’s part were taken around 2012-2013, the investigation was opened in 2015, and he got convicted in 2017.
Overstating the success rate of your business model, moving funds between subsidiaries when the investor agreements said they wouldn't be, and embezzling funds. Did I get the claims here right?
I wonder if it is all legal had he been forthcoming. I heard the "borrow money to pay dividends" thing was a well worn playbook. Not necessarily a ponzi. ut usally borrowed money serviced by earnings. Is it illegal because it wasn't stated? How to they prize apart ponzi from just aggressive debt.
If they had accurately stated the value and cash flow of the businesses and been transparent about where the money was going then technically they would have been fine.
But if they had been honest about the performance of the businesses and the way the money was being used, they would not have attracted as much investment money. A few gullible people, but not $112 million worth.
The misrepresentation was key to attracting the investment.
"Ponzi scheme" isn't a legal term, the specific SEC claims are all about fraud. But the point of calling it that is to emphasize that there was very little underlying business value to be honest about. I don't think there's any point in picking apart the story for the few parts that might have been legal if they were properly disclosed - if the SEC's allegations are correct, many of those parts would have only existed in the first place as tools to help disguise the fraud.
It's only a Ponzi if you are not actually engaged in any real business activity. Financing payments to early investors with later investors money isn't a great indicator of the quality of the business but it's acceptable if you aren't misrepresenting things to get the new investors and there is legitimate business activity.
Tai Lopez, the lamborghini youtube influencer, bought Radioshack? The company that once challenged Apple for the home computer market with Tandy Computers?
After tons of internal crisises, mismanagement, and consecutive revenue losses, Radioshack got delisted from exchanges and eventually filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2015.
After that, Radioshack got acquired, got mismanaged again, the parent company went broke, and Radioshack filed for bankruptcy again in 2017.
By the time Tai Lopez got his hands on it (late 2020), there was pretty much nothing of value left there, except the brand (and even the brand was a questionable value proposition at that point tbh).
"""
REV Chief Operating Officer Maya Burkenroad is also accused of aiding Lopez and Mehr's alleged crimes. On REV's website, Burkenroad, who is Lopez's cousin, was described as having "over 10 years of experience managing multi-million-dollar companies," according to the complaint.
But the SEC claims Lopez and Mehr misrepresented her experience. Before joining REV, she had worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a promoter at a radio station, and as an assistant to Lopez at a prior endeavor, the complaint alleges.
"""
Nice family. Hopefully they get lots of jail time.
I wonder if his prominent online persona made him more likely to be targeted. People at the SEC are very likely to be in the age range who is familiar with him.
Not to suggest he is or is not guilty but that being loud often makes others watch you more closely.
People may remember Tai Lopez from his "Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here" YouTube ad, subject of several parodies such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIwTG8V-Ko
I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing. I know nothing else about him and I hope to keep it that way.
He also ran a series of now-defunct scam dating sites with fake profiles around 2010-2015, and has been quite consistent at only operating scam businesses in the past 15 years. I know nothing about the people who hand over money to this guy, and I hope to keep it that way.
I find it difficult not to do at least a little bit of victim blaming here...
If stocks are on fire then you should probably value them for their ash contents.
It’s all about that “ash flow”.
What is a "scam dating site"? A site where AI-driven profiles you contact with, phish or socially-engineer your money out of you? That probably couldn't happen in 2015 let alone 2010, AI tech wasn't yet there.
If you mean just a "dating site where all female profiles are fake, generated by site itself", then well, it's just called a "dating site". Whole dating sites industry - with hundreds if not thousands of companies, downstream industries providing them traffic, payments, and services of all kinds, industry associations, conferences, rich networking and whatnot - is doing just that. Always did. The few "real" dating apps/sites like Tinder are just a tip of the iceberg - no one tries to really imitate them - it's not possible.
Almost everything viable on the Internet today, is a "scam" in this (to my taste, extremely strict and old-fashioned, definition). Just because all available real attention has already been harvested a long time ago, and cost of traffic, which is extremely high now because extensive way of attracting it - by having people spend more time at the screen - is no longer available as people already spend glued to the screens all day - so every time to have them visit your site you have to pay more than the other guy pays to have them visit theirs - it's an auction and prices are through the roof.
Thus, if you sell people something which isn't fake, you aren't going to turn a profit. So all who did, are out of business - with the exception of yes, "big tech" monopolies that can exploit the shit out of people in a way no run of the mill scammer like those two poor hapless chaps can even dream of.
> A site where AI-driven profiles you contact with, phish or socially-engineer your money out of you? That probably couldn't happen in 2015 let alone 2010, AI tech wasn't yet there.
Why do you think you need AI for this? You don't even need Indians for this, Americans will do it. I remember someone showing me a site a couple years ago that recruited for the job, and there was a Reddit where they talked about working it and how the rates paid were changing.
In a manual mode these days it certainly can't work. People are no longer that gullible. But to think, in 2010 it likely could! So that could be a thing.
It still works in manual mode and it is still mostly done manually, despite AI. This is the "chat" model powering 6 billion dollars of annual OnlyFans revenue and billions of dollars to dating sites advertising "girls in your area" on porn sites. Armies of mostly Filipino chatters pretend to be women and do what is essentially a soft romance scam.
Governments have essentially never looked into it, despite it having gone on uninhibited for 20+ years and at the scale of billions annually for at least 16+ years.
Fun fact: outside of the Anglosphere it's mostly people who pretend to be men, siphoning money off lonely women. Typical fake profile is a handsome American colonel deployed to Iraq (i met several women who flirted with "him" lmao), that was like, 10 years ago.
People are born every day, the world always runs on the gullible.
Oh god, I can just imagine how LLMs could make this even worse. A dating site where half the people are just bots stringing you along.
Uhh that's just every dating site since at least the 2000s.
They didn't need LLMs to build bots.
Ashley Madison for example was 10 bots for every one real woman or something absurd.
If you need something more sophisticated than basic template based bots (which always worked just fine, your marks are uh, not exactly the most observant people and really really really want to believe the pretty girl likes them), then it is probably still cheaper to run a literal slave operation in some South Asian state than pay per token.
I find it fascinating that some people work so hard at running scam companies like this guy.
Wait until you hear about tech startups
Creating fake profiles for a dating site is basically what the Reddit founders did to create Reddit. It’s no more ethically compromised than what many YC companies do.
The ones that get labeled as scams are just the ones that executed poorly
I true scam company is one that was never intended to make a profit but just steal investor money.
Many if not most scam companies scam the consumer, which is indistinguishable from profiting off a consumer.
There are also many “legitimate” tech companies that don’t make any profit, but balloon their valuation all the way to an IPO or SPAC and then profit off public investors.
So your definition still can’t distinguish between “real” companies and scam companies
We are talking about INTENT. The intent of the founders has to be to never actually have any customers or revenue but just steal investor money.
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Tai Lopez became so famous he was immortalized in the cute rogue-like "Going Under" where he is spoofed as the "Hauntrepreneur"[0]
https://going-under.fandom.com/wiki/Hauntrepreneur
> I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing.
I'm struggling to understand what this means. He put lots of ads on his videos? Or something else.
He would pay to have his videos as ads on other people’s videos.
E.g., I’d go to watch a video of SmarterEveryDay, and Tai Lopez would show up as an ad, telling me all about his Lamborghinis and bookshelves of books he’d never read. And people would just watch the full ad, even after they could’ve skipped (5s).
That was an interesting era of YouTube, for sure.
This is an example of the fact that while only 1% would watch the whole thing, they just raised their hands as the marks, to be worked on through the whole funnel.
A view counts as a view before the full video though, so running it as an ad still makes it look like you have an audience.
When people leave autoplay on, they might not even realize they watched an ad, I guess?
There are armies of bad parents or babysitters that just hand baby an Ipad, not on child or restricted mode, and just let youtube literally Clockwork Orange a human being.
It's horrifying.
Is that against TOS? Was it scam?
It's not against YouTube's ToS to run pre-roll ads of any length, of course. But I think he was just selling get-rich-quick schemes or something. At the time YouTube ads were more rare and generally short, like 15 second TV commercials, so it was weird to see long-form content as ads. He absolutely saturated the site with this ad for a while to the point that it became a meme. I'm guessing a significant percentage of YouTube's user base at the time was served that ad at least once.
Yeah I still occasionally get really long ads that must be just to see who watches all (most?) of them.
He defrauded investers out of $120M.
I couldn't find any record of a conviction with a cursory google
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releas... They are not convicted yet.
Not because you are next to a Lamborghini it means it's yours.
And many houses featured in videos are content houses... (lavish rentals for influencers to have a luxury background for their videos)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_house
https://blog.giggster.com/how-to-rent-a-tiktok-collab-house-...
Reminds me of Todrick Hall who gave a "tour of the $7 million house he just bought, OMG can't believe I'm a home owner in Beverly Hills!" on his youtube channel then got evicted for unpaid rent and sued for $100k of back-owed rent money. https://people.com/home/todrick-hall-ordered-to-pay-100k-in-...
He later had a $126k lawsuit for unpaid furniture: https://radaronline.com/p/todrick-hall-sued-126000-unpaid-fu...
he legitatmely innovated/invented a whole type of youtube channel/influencer. clearly was never a moral person, doesnt mean he wasnt influential
Does mean I’ll make sure not to remember his name, though! Thanks, I had no idea who he was until this thread, appreciate the opinion.
I never saw his videos but his name still came up a lot as a know scammer in many forums. He was prolific in his reach toward vulnerable populations who were desperate to get rich quickly. There are a lot of young people who feel that their only chance at having a decent life is to strike it rich from something big. People like this person prey on those thoughts.
> There are a lot of young people who feel that their only chance at having a decent life is to strike it rich from something big.
Yup. It was bad enough 10 years ago, but now... IMHO the despair has gone exponentially worse. On one side, you got big name YouTubers/Twitch/Kick streamers getting absurdly large deals to shill VPNs and supplements of questionable utility and safety, then for young women you got OnlyFans and its various copycats with excesses like Lil Tay making 1 M$ in 24 hours after turning 18 (problematic in itself - it seems like almost every female child/juvie actor has to cope with absolute weirdos doing countdowns to when they "turn legal").
And on the other side you get an entire generation of people who know that they will never even have the chance to own a home even if they work their entire life.
[1] https://www.eonline.com/news/1420720/lil-tay-says-she-made-s...
I've had that video in my saved videos playlist for so long now.
I only clicked into this thread hoping someone would link exactly that video.
Previous context?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29607989 ("RadioShack – Bringing Cryptocurrency to the Mainstream (radioshack.com)" (2021))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31958998 ("RadioShack reinvents itself as a crypto platform with wild tweets (washingtonpost.com)" (2022))
(Amusing to count five different HN'ers calling it a "scam", and two more calling it a "Ponzi").
As this is a tech forum, I expect that the name that stands out is Radio Shack, and I do agree that that story is tragic. For me, as a long time New Yorker, the other name that stands out is Modell's. They were, for quite a long time, a fixture in New York City and beyond. Even for us not sports inclined, we still knew Modell's as a reliable retailer of sneakers throughout the years. Arguably, their Covid era bankruptcy was already the end, and this was just private equity puppeting the corpse. Nevertheless, it's a sad and nostalgic story.
Gotta go to Mo’s!
I sang that.
I thought you were going to say Pier 1 instead. Because I was scammed into buying wicker furniture circa 1994, I’m not surprised pier 1 is continuing buying a legacy of scams.
Your comment makes me wonder what ever happened to Crazy Eddie.
tax fraud.
Modell's was the go-to if your team won last night.
If it helps, Dick’s is from Binghamton.
Circa 2010, I met Tai and he wanted some work done for his portfolio of dating websites he had back then. (He had a whole bunch of them targeted to various ethnic groups, religious subgroups and so on.)
It became apparent that (a) he had a huge pile of messy PHP, WordPress-based sites, and then (b) expressed contempt for paying $35 an hour for programmers since his opinion was you could get programmers in the third world for $5 an hour. He negotiated me down to $25. I ended up declining.
Like many people who crow about how they’re a “millionaire”, when it came time to show the money, he was suddenly really concerned about very small amounts of money here and there.
Never met him personally, but one of his companies tried to recruit me for a database migration project. Part of the interview process included responding to the question "I enjoy having sex with people I hardly know" on a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree.
This guy loves court cases I guess?
Dude what the actual F. This is a crazy thing to put into a job interview.
Unless it's for a job in the adult entertainment industry.
Or if the ”recruiter” is foreign military intelligence looking to compromise people who may land in positions of interest during the next 20-30 years.
People such as database administrators.
Lol great point!
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Lately he has been promoting “AI automation agency” course.
He says anyone can label themselves “AI automation expert” and charge thousands of dollars for it, then just use vibe coding tools to do the job or outsource it.
He also says he built an entire app using replit.
Unironically the gap between his AI automation agency and VC backed "Enterprise Automation" startups is smaller than you think..
It is kind of fundamental to the nature of bubbles that near their peak they tend to feature more traditional investors backing ventures that in any other context everyone with any common sense would stay away from because the ratio of scam red flags to rational bases for believing it was a good investment are too high.
Quite. Sounds as much like Builder.AI, the London startup where AI genuinely did stand for "actually Indians", as it does Amazon Go, whose pick-and-go stores had their cameras monitored by people in India to ensure it all worked as they said it did.
Don’t forget most vertical AI “agent” startups
I am so shocked someone like this would jump on the AI hype train!
I don't know Tai Lopez and he seems like an asshole based on his public persona but I think you'd be surprised by the number of (especially first generation) millionaires who will negotiate over pennies. The easiest way to have a lot of money is to earn a lot and not spend a lot.
A friend is in commercial real estate. If you own office or warehouse space, he finds you a company to rent the space, and help negotiate the deal. Then after the deal is done, the (very wealthy) building owner often will try to re-negotiate down the agreed to fee, or say he'll pay it in four years. The guy works for 6 months getting the deal done, is supposed to get like $25K, then the wealthy building owner says he'll give him $10K and will pay over 4 years. Crazy business.
Earning a lot does the heavy lifting here (and rent of various kinds does the heavily lifting of that in turn). It's far, far easier to be "frugal" in % of your income when your income is high.
People like this Tai guy pay a premium for screwing people over, they pretty clearly could have made more money, more safely, if they didn't love the feeling of getting one up on you. That explains their attitude better than some virtue of frugality.
I've known several very rich people and the first thing I learned was that they are rich because they never spend their own money on anything.
Having money allows you to spend time elsewhere, like cherry picking desperate employees. I know temp agencies that have it as the whole business model. If you aren't desperate you don't fit.
A study found that most American millionaires lived in modest homes and drove used American cars. They made their wealth by being concerned about relatively small amounts of money because it adds up. When we think "millionaire" we think of the dream that is sold to us by Hollywood—mansions, fancy cars, endless parties. But entertainers are paid in the millions and then encouraged to live like billionaires, so that they're desperate enough to continue being slaves to the entertainment-industrial complex to keep the gravy train going.
But $35/hr was a pittance for a programmer even in 2010. Tai Lopez is a gigantic tool for cheaping out on that.
I think the point is someone who has 500k after a lifetime of putting money in a 401k along with 600k in home equity is not the same as someone who lives in a mansion and has a few exotic cars.
Tai posed as the latter, so suddenly caring about $35 an hour is very suspicious.
Precisely. It’s quite funny how any time this comes up - a person of dubious wealth who claims to be rich being a penny-pincher - people are quick to chime in with something implying they got rich by doing that. It’s like the inverse of the whole “maybe if you didn’t eat avocado toast you’d afford that $500k house…” thing
"Millionaire" is now practically synonymous with "professional nearing retirement". About 1 in 15 Americans have a net worth of over $1m.
A million dollars isn’t cool anymore, it’s like $500k a few years ago.
It starts to be cool when you have like $10 million dollars. We need a term for people who have 8 figures now that 7 is so common.
You know what's cool? A billion dollars.
Rich?
Decamillionaire?
India provides crore for 10 million but i can’t tell if it should be croraire or croreaire
Da-millionaire
I'd be interested to know what proportion of these millionnaires' net worth came from inheritances. That's the real dream Hollywood never tells you about.
Probably not as much as you probably think. Most "millionaires" today are just boomers from working class backgrounds who bought a modest property back in the 70s and now 50 years later all their illiquid assets, primarily their property, can be added up to one or two million.
Those assets are typically not counted when counting millionaires, IIRC.
Basically, your net worth is total asset minus your primary residence.
> Basically, your net worth is total asset minus your primary residence.
Net worth includes equity in your primary residence. That is the value of the property minus outstanding mortgage amount.
There are some investment scenarios where net worth is calculated minus primary residence, but those are specialty cases that are explicitly called out.
Well actors have a very strong union in the US, they used to be paid peanuts. When you have that kind of labor power, your security comes from the union, not your stored wealth, so they can afford to spend because they know they will be well compensated for their work.
There is no security. The actors' unions set minimum wages for union productions. But they don't guarantee work to anyone, and many productions are non-union. Every experienced actor is aware that they might never get another role.
Acting is notorious for being a bad career choice, and the small fraction of actors who become wealthy through acting do so because of the structure of the market for entertainment (namely, fame sells tickets, so the employers of entertainers all want to hire already-famous entertainers, making it very difficult for unknown entertainers to become famous, which is necessary to start earning good money), not because of anything to do with any union.
Since ancient times, acting and prostitution have been considered closely related industries and I think this probably never changed. The actors who "make it big" are the ones that win favors with producers one way or another, probably in many cases by sating their perverted desires. Some of this was revealed in #MeToo cases, like all the Weinstein stuff.
And there have been many books written on this topic well before Weinstein came in the scene so it's not a new thing in Hollywood at all.
One of the most painful interviews I recall was Limor Fried (Ladyada) interviewing Tai about RadioShack.
https://youtu.be/u8wwBIA8wMw?si=cKWzNq4Qu_nCQcMA
I tried to pick out the most painful segments, but it was hard to choose. 6m30s is a strong contender but 28m31s takes the crown for me.
Tracking-free link: https://youtu.be/u8wwBIA8wMw
Thank you! Was quickly composed on mobile and I didn't notice it had the tracking salt on it (and it's too late for me to edit the original).
Prediction:
If they are found guilty, their company will get fined, they will still be rich.
This will keep happening unless you a) take back their personal wealth and return it to investors and b) put them in jail & c) black list them from holding office at a corporation in the future.
I dont know.
Pre-Trump that is NOT what used to happen in these cases. Defrauding your investors used to actually land rich people in jail.
But it's not investor fraud if it actually makes the company money and is at least somewhat in the gray area.
No, it is still fraud, even if your fraudelent actions ended up making the investors/company money. And it will land you in prison.
This is exactly what Martin Shkreli spent his time in prison for (and not for anything related to Daraprim drug price increases, despite what some people apparently believe, as I discovered).
TLDR (with a great deal of oversimplification): he ran a hedge fund (MSMB) and was lying to investors about how much money the fund had and about the investment strategies. He then started a pharma company called Retrophin and used some of his equity in Retrophin to compensate the MSMB investors for their losses (without their knowledge, i.e., basically the exact same issue with lying about investment strategies to investors he had earlier). It just so happened that Retrophin ended up performing fairly well at the time, and that equity actually ended up making profit for those investors overall.
Investors/company making money in the end is not a valid defense against fraud charges. If a hedge fund manager or a CEO cashes out the investor/company accounts in secret, goes to Vegas to place it all on red, makes a gain, and then puts it back into the investor/company account, it is still a crime. Despite the fact that the investors/company made money in the end, I don’t think it is wrong to call this a fraudelent move.
However, the wheels of justice tend to be slow, and it might take some time for the consequences to catch up. Those fraudelent actions on Shkreli’s part were taken around 2012-2013, the investigation was opened in 2015, and he got convicted in 2017.
None of what you said is true.
Overstating the success rate of your business model, moving funds between subsidiaries when the investor agreements said they wouldn't be, and embezzling funds. Did I get the claims here right?
The root issue is material misrepresentation of the businesses.
They told investors lies about how well the companies were doing and how the funds were to be used.
The Ponzi part comes from paying old investors with money from new investors but telling everyone it’s from the business’ cash flow, which was a lie.
I wonder if it is all legal had he been forthcoming. I heard the "borrow money to pay dividends" thing was a well worn playbook. Not necessarily a ponzi. ut usally borrowed money serviced by earnings. Is it illegal because it wasn't stated? How to they prize apart ponzi from just aggressive debt.
If they had accurately stated the value and cash flow of the businesses and been transparent about where the money was going then technically they would have been fine.
But if they had been honest about the performance of the businesses and the way the money was being used, they would not have attracted as much investment money. A few gullible people, but not $112 million worth.
The misrepresentation was key to attracting the investment.
"Ponzi scheme" isn't a legal term, the specific SEC claims are all about fraud. But the point of calling it that is to emphasize that there was very little underlying business value to be honest about. I don't think there's any point in picking apart the story for the few parts that might have been legal if they were properly disclosed - if the SEC's allegations are correct, many of those parts would have only existed in the first place as tools to help disguise the fraud.
It's only a Ponzi if you are not actually engaged in any real business activity. Financing payments to early investors with later investors money isn't a great indicator of the quality of the business but it's acceptable if you aren't misrepresenting things to get the new investors and there is legitimate business activity.
It's only a Ponzi scheme if it comes from Ponzi Vineyards. Otherwise it's just sparkling fraud.
https://www.ponzivineyards.com/
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ponzi+Vineyards/@45.379619...
Tai Lopez, the lamborghini youtube influencer, bought Radioshack? The company that once challenged Apple for the home computer market with Tandy Computers?
Yes, he bought a dead husk of a company.
After tons of internal crisises, mismanagement, and consecutive revenue losses, Radioshack got delisted from exchanges and eventually filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2015.
After that, Radioshack got acquired, got mismanaged again, the parent company went broke, and Radioshack filed for bankruptcy again in 2017.
By the time Tai Lopez got his hands on it (late 2020), there was pretty much nothing of value left there, except the brand (and even the brand was a questionable value proposition at that point tbh).
""" REV Chief Operating Officer Maya Burkenroad is also accused of aiding Lopez and Mehr's alleged crimes. On REV's website, Burkenroad, who is Lopez's cousin, was described as having "over 10 years of experience managing multi-million-dollar companies," according to the complaint.
But the SEC claims Lopez and Mehr misrepresented her experience. Before joining REV, she had worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a promoter at a radio station, and as an assistant to Lopez at a prior endeavor, the complaint alleges. """
Nice family. Hopefully they get lots of jail time.
I wonder if his prominent online persona made him more likely to be targeted. People at the SEC are very likely to be in the age range who is familiar with him.
Not to suggest he is or is not guilty but that being loud often makes others watch you more closely.
I think it's the other way around: There are many fraud cases like his. We only hear about this one because he is notorious.
I can't read "Ponzi scheme" without thinking "Bonzi Buddy scheme". Y'all should just change the term already.
I think I have seen this Radioshack story on CoffeeZilla's channel ages ago?
> they said their portfolio companies were "on fire" and that "cash flow is strong."
I’m sorry but what kind of idiot would believe this about the zombie online version of Radio Shack that remained?
No shit. End private equity.
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See also: Oracle?