Just who exactly IS Dan Bilzerian?
Okay, everyone knows WHO he is.
We all know about his millions of Instagram followers, and the lifestyle he portrays on
there.
But who IS Dan Bilzerian?
Why did he all of a sudden become super famous?
And most importantly how did he actually make his money?
We have to really dig in from the beginning.
Let’s get right into it!
Family Business Dan was born on December 5th, 1980, to Paul
Bilzerian and Terri Steffen.
Let’s face it.
He grew up rich with rich parents in a giant eleven-bedroom mansion in Tampa, Florida.
Their house was so big that it has its own indoor basketball court, batting cage, and
swimming pool!
But where did all the wealth come from?
His dad was a pretty famous businessman on Wall Street.
Famous not in a good way.
Paul Bilzerian had made his money by doing his style of corporate raiding.
What he would typically do is buy enough stock in a company to threaten to take it over,
and then sell his stock at a profit to buyers resisting the takeover.
Doing corporate raiding as your main way to make money means that you have to have some
pretty thick skin, something Paul Bilzerian definitely seems like he has.
So Dan’s already had it in his DNA to not really care about what other people think.
Right?
Not according to his Instagram, but we’ll get into that a bit later.
SEC Troubles Paul Bilzerian made tens of millions of dollars
in the 80s from his corporate raids.
But he didn’t do all his business deals in an ethical way.
Not according to the government!
He was convicted in 1989 of fraud, conspiracy, and making false statements to the SEC.
He paid a $1.5 million fine and got a prison sentence of four years, although he only served
13 months of the sentence.
But then there was the civil suit the SEC filed against him after his conviction.
That was the 62 million dollars of profit the SEC was trying to get back from Bilzerian
for the takeovers he did that the government said were illegal.
Bilzerian Net Worth Paul Bilzerian himself has stated his net
worth to be different amounts at different times in his life, but that would make sense.
At his 1989 hearing, he put his net worth at more than $50 million.
In a private lawsuit later that same year, he told the courts that his net worth was
$81.4 million.
Then there were other times he’s said he made hundreds of millions of dollars.
So what figure’s the real figure?
This one only the Bilzerians know.
And they may not even know the real figure because of how their assets were spread out,
something we’ll talk about in a minute!
But Paul Bilzerian has long maintained that the conviction was wrong.
His reasoning?
Because nobody was hurt by his actions!
His official order to return the 62 million dollars he illegally made came in 1993.
But Paul Bilzerian was prepared.
By the time that order came, what had Paul Bilzerian done?
In short, he hid all his money!
Money Trail In 1991, Paul Bilzerian and his wife Terri
built a mansion, but it was put just in her name.
Three months after that, Paul Bilzerian simply filed for bankruptcy.
And this wouldn’t be the first time he filed.
He said he had suffered huge losses on Singer, a company he owned after taking it over.
Years passed by and the SEC still hadn’t collected any of the money he was supposed
to have returned.
But Bilzerian argued that after he went bankrupt, the debt to the SEC should have been dropped!
He argued that the purpose of the lawsuit was to return money he shouldn’t have gotten,
and he no longer had any significant assets to return, so it was finished.
Although these arguments didn't work, the tactics stalled the SEC's effort to collect
for years.
What the SEC found in their investigation was that Bilzerian had created a network of
trusts, partnerships and corporations in the US, the Cook Islands, the Cayman Islands and
other places.
Properties that were once in their names were transferred to these entities.
In 2000, a federal judge found Paul Bilzerian in contempt of court, saying he had quote
"made no attempt whatsoever to pay the judgment."
The judge later put Bilzerian in jail until he could show he was no longer trying to avoid
paying the judgment.
Paul Bilzerian has been officially quoted as saying, "I would rather starve to death
than earn a dollar to feed myself and pay the government a penny of it."
There’s plenty of other tactics that Bilzerian has done to avoid paying the fine, such as
filing bankruptcy a second time, but we’re not going to go any deeper into the details.
You can see the clear picture now.
The elder Bilzerian would rather fight tooth and nail to keep his money than give the government
ANY of it.
No matter how much it costs him.
For what it’s worth, only a person who really feels like they didn’t do anything wrong
would go this route, so Bilzerian does really seem to believe that.
To this day, the SEC has only collected $3.7 million from Paul Bilzerian.
And they’ve spent more than SIX million dollars trying to get it back!
Protection So really, where did all the money most likely
go?
At this point, it’s almost anyone’s guess.
Paul and Terri insist that they lost all their money.
Well, let’s assume that they didn’t.
Where would they hide their money?
Once Paul and Terri get older, who would they give the money to?
Logically, it would be to Dan and his brother Adam.
The Bilzerian brothers became trust fund babies.
They’ve admitted to having trust funds, but the actual amount they’ve never divulged.
And maybe Papa Bilzerian told the boys that they have to come up with at least SOMETHING
to show that they actually made their own money.
Because maybe one day the government will figure out a way to come for their money and
claim they were never supposed to have gotten it, even after Papa Bilzerian is no more.
So Paul made his sons find SOME sort of way to show that they made a lot of money just
in case that happens.
So maybe that’s THE reason why Dan created his Instagram.
The point of running the Instagram ads, paying the models to hang out with him, renting the
large mansions, and living the life that a teenage boy would adore is so that he could
eventually create a business off of his exploding fame.
Poker Acumen First they tried poker.
Maybe they could actually make it in the poker world.
In 2009, when they both made deep runs in the World Series of Poker Main Event, they
were nicknamed the Flying Bilzerian Brothers.
They both were described as Venture Capitalists.
For Dan, that was his only cash ever in a live poker tournament when he came in 180th
place and won a little over 36 thousand dollars.
Adam seemed to be the better poker tournament player, as he actually has total live tournament
cashes of around 877 thousand dollars.
However, that’s still nowhere close to the millions they need to show.
But the funny thing is, Dan decided to stick to the story for years.
He went on Joe Rogan and said that he made all his money from playing poker.
He even has said that he made a whopping 50 million dollars in 2014 playing poker against
billionaires!
That’s just not possible at all.
The high stakes poker community is extremely small, so everyone in that community knows
who everyone is.
They know all the billionaires who play high stakes.
They know all the games that happen.
And these high stakes poker players DON’T see Bilzerian in these games.
And they haven’t heard of the billionaires who supposedly lost millions of dollars to
Dan.
High Stakes poker player Doug Polk has called out Bilzerian before.
He took the time to examine Bilzerian’s poker game in a heads-up cash game that was
streamed live on Twitch.
Polk never played with Bilzerian at any of the high stakes games he’s played in, so
he didn’t have any experience playing against him.
But he’s still able to get even more information from his game watching the stream, since he
can see Bilzerian’s hole cards.
From Polk's analysis, even though Bilzerian is an aggressive poker player, most of his
play amounted to him just being a bad player.
Polk watched Bilzerian make a number of basic mistakes that a high level poker player simply
wouldn’t do.
He came to the conclusion that Bilzerian’s story of winning tens of millions of dollars
is completely impossible.
Business Acumen What about his businesses?
Bilzerian HAS to have SOME money come in from SOME business right?
Dan does have businesses in his name.
Except, it doesn’t seem like there are any of them that make money.
So far, it looks like the only thing Dan Bilzerian is good at is just spending money!
Dan started a company called Ignite in September of 2018 as a recreational cannabis brand.
Then it all of a sudden became a CBD company.
Then it just became a company that’s happy to just put its logo on anything it could.
Where did the cash flow come from?
The company raised money from investors by selling company stock, and they also raised
money through debt.
Ignite got $25 million dollars from stock, $19.9 million dollars from convertible debt,
and another $23.7 million dollars from short term debt.
However Ignite lost a reported 50 million dollars in 2019!
But where did the money go?
Basically paying for all of Bilzerian’s lifestyle.
That and to pay people that were acting like they were running a company with investor
money.
Ignite lost $43 million in 2019 on operational costs, which was made up of Bilzerian’s
personal expenses masquerading as marketing and promotion, the cost of leasing office
spaces, and compensation for staff and executives.
One example of a fake business expense was Dan Bilzerian’s $2.4 million dollar annual
rent that showed up on the books.
Red flags were first raised by the accountants doing the books in preparation for Ignite’s
annual report.
They found plenty of suspicious charges on Bilzerian’s credit card and written off
as company expenses, such as a half-million dollar yacht rental and $26,000 dollars to
boost Bilzerian’s Instagram followers.
Bilzerian expected the company to approve any of his expenses he submitted as legitimate
“business expenses”.
Curtis Heffernan was the former President of Ignite.
He claims in his lawsuit against Ignite that Bilzerian funded his lifestyle through the
company.
But Heffernan didn’t want to participate in financial fraud.
Specifically, he refused to misclassify a government loan as “miscellaneous income”
on Ignite’s balance sheets!
Wait, there was a government loan involved here?
This means that some of the money Dan Bilzerian used was also YOUR money!
Ignite received $1.2 million dollars in Paycheck Protection Program loans from the Small Business
Administration!
Because Heffernan didn’t want to commit fraud, Bilzerian had him fired.
That’s what Heffernan claims anyways.
Ignite cash also was found to have paid expenses for OTHER companies owned by Bilzerian.
In short, Ignite was a company that was treated like an ATM by Dan Bilzerian since it was
other people’s money!
The Likely Truth
So did Bilzerian really make his money from poker?
Most likely not.
There’s practically a ZERO percent chance Dan made it from poker.
Does Bilzerian know how to run a business?
From Ignite’s track record, that answer is a big no.
So the most likely scenario is that Paul Bilzerian didn’t go bankrupt at all.
That money he made from the 80s corporate raiding is hidden in an assortment of different
ways, and it’s all left to Dan and Adam Bilzerian!
Here’s what’s next!