Plenty of people out there with way more debt than assets. But if you can put your liabilities out far enough you can live like that forever.
You start with something modest, like $100,000 loan at 10-15%. You keep 75%. That’s your starting salary and covers you for a whole year. You use 25% to work on a scam that will generate $1,000-$1,500 a month to pay back your loan. You are scamming such small amounts from the most desperate people so you’ll never get caught or punished.
You get better at it and keep repeating. You work your way up to borrowing $1,000,000. You keep $800k, and spend $200k on scams that can generate $10-$20k a month. Really not that much if you never plan on actually paying back the loan.
Before you know it you’re at $10 million. You’re a multimillionaire now. You’ve “manifested” the life of your dreams. You’ve bought a house and cars and all sorts of stuff and your scam empire is now generating $100-200k a month. Your reach has grown and you are now attracting real ad revenue on top of scam money.
These kinds people are always working on “projects” and “products”. Whenever a project starts to look like it won’t generate what’s needed they literally just bail and refuse to pay anyone. And if anyone ever did go after them they wouldn’t get anything, because these people are broke.
You can live your entire life like this. You can live a great life with all the luxuries. What you can’t do is stop. It’s why these people never go away. People always say, “Why don’t these people just retire?” The answer is because they can’t. They may have a Bugatti, but the show must go on or it all goes away. Paying out $500k a month is not a big deal when you’ve got $20 million of runway but you know the end of the runway exists.
I remember an old video of Logan Paul, from way back in the Vine days where he says (paraphrasing), “I spend every moment of every day thinking about how to become more famous.” His life is a 24/7 hustle. Even the videos where he appears to be “chillin” are carefully staged and curated.
Ask yourself this: If you actually had a true NET worth of $50 million would you really be wasting your time on nonsense podcasts and NFTs?
Isn't it kind of similar in a way, though? Musk doesn't actually have 180B does he? First, he's now worth less thanks to the Tesla stock tanking, but even then, it's not like he can just sell a bunch of stocks freely to do things with it. AIUI, he had to go through a lot of hoops to actually pay for Twitter.
Ultimately we exist in a society, a species even, that relies on persuading each other for support. Persuasion beats utility. Even very useful things often require persuasion to get people to use them.
Humans also collectively generate more ideas and products in a single day than a single person could evaluate over their entire lifetime.
Whether we realize it or not, no matter how DIY or independent we might be, we all rely on trust in others’ specializations to live anything resembling a modern lifestyle.
People are quick to judge those who have misplaced their trust as “dumb” but trust is quite a difficult thing to evaluate, particularly when information asymmetry is involved.
People who fall for scams usually do so in a very rational way, given the trust networks they have built for themselves.
I wouldn’t be surprised if those people were actually faking everything, including their wealth. You can always rent a luxurious car for a photoshoot and pretend it’s yours..
My trust on anything happening on instagram or youtube has now reached 0
To put it in perspective there’s a lot of startups with real useful products that have way less funding or revenue than people like this.
How is this possible?