Mystery monk makes billions with 5-hour energy (2012)
forbes.com
forbes.com
We missed his stories where he was variously an MMA fighter, a firefighter, and a marine who served as a secret sniper assassin who trained somewhere the actual marine informed us doesn't actually exist.
Ethics committees frown on poisoning people just to figure out how much is lethal.
LD10 is plenty for me never touch it outside of a life threatening emergency.
Which is to say, no, I would not feel comfortable consuming the equivalent LD49 of a substance. It is an order of magnitude estimate to give you a sense of toxicity. Which in the case of caffeine - is so high that it is nearly impossible for a healthy individual to consume that much accidentally.
He found a container of powdered caffeine someone had brought and decided that he didn’t have to follow the instructions like normal humans. Not only that, he mixed up the measurements. In the end he took what very well could have been a fatal dose. Even with a visit to the hospital his heart rate was above 200 resting for over a day. They had to work to flush his system and whatever but he said it took weeks to sleep normally again.
He lived with a harem of women who pleasured him at all hours. He divorced his wife, but he was such a good lover, she begged him to reconcile, so he remarried her.
Once a customer happened to be a WWII Medal of Honor recipient, and gifted him a rifle used to kill many Germans as a gift for his good work as a food delivery expert.
One time he delivered food, and the recipient said, "Dan, you are so good at this, here is a $10,000 tip."
He could have easily received a PhD, but instead dropped out of community college after a single semester, because college was beneath him. His professors all gave him A's and cried when he dropped out.
He drank 2 liters of Mountain Dew every single night to keep his energy levels high. Without Mountain Dew, he would die.
He had been asked numerous times to manage all of the region's chain restaurants, but was satisfied to be a delivery boy, as this was his true calling.
One thing I miss about high school was being around guys like this. There was always some dude who said he secretly had a top secret mission to Afghanistan over the summer and the military was begging him to officially join when he turned 18. It's interesting how no matter where you are in the US, there's a guy with a similar backstory of being a total badass who chooses to be humble and normal because the world couldn't handle his true power.
Nowadays I'm more inclined to pity them. It sounds like he's trapped in a pretty shitty state of being, even if it's a prison of his own making.
Coca-cola = coca leaves + kola nuts = cocaine + caffeine
Caffeine was everywhere too in the era of drug concoctions. Today's soda's were the health tonics of the 1800s. 7-up had lithium in it, the drug used to treat some bipolar cases.
The drugs that survived public use were the ones that were paradoxically safer and more dangerous at the same time, depending on how you measure it.
>This kind of deal raises questions, says Roger Colinvaux, professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law and an expert on tax and philanthropy. “If it were a private foundation, it would be prohibited from selling to a company related to a major donor.”
Is it just me or can this critical part of the story be summarised as follows:
1. Dabble around with no apparent income
2. ???
3. Profit!
I read many "successful businessman" biographies in my younger years and eventually stopped because the vast majority of them had these unreplicable mysterious inflection points. As a young man seeking the magical formula for success it frustrated me to no end.
* Corruption.
* Nepotism or family help.
* Some special circumstance they don't want to share because it is either critical or embarrassing.
* Very hard work.
“During this period, Bhargava moved back and forth between the US and India and worked a variety of middle-class office and construction jobs. Bhargava returned to the US and joined his parents' plastic injection manufacturing company, Bhar Incorporated, located in New Haven, Indiana.”
Wait…what?
Anyway he owns and does long term rental of maybe 20-30 apartments mostly in Munich (not airbnb or similar). No problem for him buying additional apartments and houses in very expensive places across Europe on spur (or recently Egypt). Also some old sports cars etc. Yet often a penny pincher when it comes to investing into relationship.
The weird part is, when asked what he was doing before becoming a rentier, 'he had some manager job', in Germany. Now I haven't lived there specifically but I know net salaries don't go that high if you work for somebody else, and taxes and social deductions are brutal. This ain't US where 10x performance can give you 10x salary if you do it right and are lucky. And he ain't a C-suite material.
He keeps claiming its all just his own effort but I just can't calculate a realistic path where even a highly capable person can get in their early 40s such vast net worth from 0 (I could grok some lucky exponential path via airbnbs but thats not what he does).
This is a very conservative investment path of ending up with maybe 2-3 apartments if you really push it hard and do all the right choices at the right time. So he is either laundering money for some mafia/gang (but certainly doesn't seem like so) or got a small help from family initially and refuses to admit that.
Nobody thought about that until I came along and just wondered about those numbers a bit.
Good luck with that at a German bank.
The mortgage is likely interest only so the landlord can make approximately £10k/year from rent from that one property. The next year they buy another, their earnings are now £120k. It now only takes them a few months to save another £50k to buy their next property, and the more properties they own the faster it is to acquire the next one. After a few years of this let's say they have 10 properties in total. They are now earning £200k, which makes the bank's decision to lend them more money an easier one, even though they have £1.5m in mortgage debt already.
If they already have 10 properties then it's not that much of a relative leap to get to 20, then 30. With 30 properties they're earning £400k a year and can finance a new property every 2 months. They do have £4.5m in mortgage debt that is not being paid off though, but they're making a bet on the value of those properties exceeding the purchase price by the time the balance of the mortgages becomes due 20 years from now. In the past that was a pretty safe bet.
The risk of doing all of this is that the property market can slow down, rates can go up, values can fall, property maintenance can become a significant cost, bad tenants can ruin a property and wipe out several years earnings and the government can change tax rules that makes all of this far less profitable (as happened in the UK quite recently). But it's absolutely not impossible.
About a decade ago I worked with a perfectly normal guy in his mid 50s who worked as an accountant in a small software company, he had 200 BTL mortgages! He just kept reinvesting the profits and buying more each month.
No German bank is going to give you 100% mortgage (in fact 110-120% for taxes/fees/additional reconstruction) when you already have 10 properties mortgaged in exactly same way. You also don't build any cash reserve like that, owning properties is always more costly than financial projections make it so.
At the end it doesn't matter, good for him (apart from everything that makes a man the man) but his vague background story as told simply ain't true, and folks were eating all that till I came along and thought about numbers for few seconds.
Purchasing any property is a many-month endeavour with solicitors/banks etc
There are specialized firms w/ private capital that are happy to fund these midsize deal flow guys and finance them. Once you get a working relationship with a few such vendors it seems rather easy to get marginal deals done others would find impossible.
I don't know if this simply doesn't exist in the UK at all - but I'd bet money that it does in some form. Since bankers and finance make their money off the points on deployed capital, especially the loan officer making commission on the deal flow, the incentives are aligned to make more loans vs. less.
I think the hardest part of getting something like this going is the first 2 to 3 properties. After that and a few years of proven ability to manage cashflow here in the US your lending options open up exponentially both in number of lenders and the creative/exotic means of financing now available.
Real estate is one of those things where if you have a certain personality that likes to gamble and don't mind operating in a shady manner you are rewarded handsomely for it until a wider economic shift happens. It's the only socially acceptable gambling anyone can do where a bank will give an average joe 5x or more leverage and we see it as totally socially acceptable. Change that to the same guy trying to operate the same strategy in the stock market and he would be laughed out of the room by the bankers he requested the loan from.
When you find banks willing to finance 90-70% of a building on an interest only loan, it doesn't take a very long time to roll that into your next building. It then snowballs as you use the cashflow from those buildings to leverage into new buildings. It works great until it doesn't. So long as rent gets paid and buildings continue to increase in value everything works out fine. Once you get the first half dozen or so buildings set up, it appears to me it's harder finding new deals than it is finding the financing for them. I did the napkin math once and after around half a dozen to a dozen properties (depending on size) you start having enough cash to roll into a similar sized building every quarter.
Pretty much all the "real estate guys" I know own absolutely nothing of their buildings other than appreciated value, as they operate on interest only loans leveraging their monthly cashflow.
tldr; Leverage is a hell of a drug.
It’s still depressing thinking about it. Because sadly in so many ways, it seems he is correct. I could replicate his business model save for the fact my morals won’t let me.
His entire business operates off the premise that if he can make good on the 5% of people that complain, that it makes the fortune he makes from the rest that dont viable. Because most people it seems are just too lazy to care about a lot of these activities, even if they do get burned.
Because the business runs purely off google adds (and he has an exceptional return rate) it doesnt matter if any of the above customers come back, its already built into his margins.
A site goes down or gets impacted by a consumer affairs complaint or whatever, he just reboots with another domain in under half a day, starts all over again. He aint tied to his brands, customers, any of it. It's all in the magic of his maniuplation of the ad market.
"In a country with this many people and the modern ads market there is literally always another sucker around the corner."
He can be literally as shitty as he wants, and as long as he manages the fallout (which he has) he prints money. I found out through working with him that there are large numbers of these individuals all following the same model, and all respectively making more than they deserve.
It's literally one of the most depressing things i've ever encountered.
You might say "He couldnt do this forever but" yeah well, twelve years and counting and he lives in the multi million dollar house and I assure you, I do not.
As for your last point, I think if you amass a certain amount of money then you can eventually just get out of that and into something more "legit", it's like buying your way out of morality. I do wonder deep deep down what these people are like in their minds when they're not riding the highs.
> As for your last point, I think if you amass a certain amount of money then you can eventually just get out of that and into something more "legit"
I queried this and I got the answer that "the business probably literally wouldnt be profitable, much more profitable this way."
> I do wonder deep deep down what these people are like in their minds when they're not riding the highs.
"Fuck em, if they are dumb enough to fall for it, they deserve it. Ill take a pensioners every last dollar if they give it to me."
I "can't fuck" like that indeed. I simple do not have even one tenth within me of what it would require to be able to live and operate like that.
I saw government organisations, Google, payment processors, paypal, all have dealt with him, and somehow the scheme just keeps on working. Probably because everybody involved is making boatloads of money and none of them actually truely give a shit.
1) Spot small business product that has potential.
2) Remake & update as your own version
3) Build a large distribution network
4) Blow any other competing company away with court cases.
On that, something I changed my mind on years back, distribution network often more important than product and it would be interesting to know what he did here. Generally I would prefer to have an average product with a great distribution network than an amazing product with a poor distribution network. People tend to be very product/feature focused but access to markets is often more important for success.
A man buys an apple, walks around, and sells it. Then, he buys two apples, walks around again, and sells them. Next, he doubles his effort by buying four apples, walking around, and selling them as well. Suddenly, he receives a phone call informing him that his wealthy cousin has passed away, leaving him a substantial inheritance. Now, the man is wealthy.
The Mystery Monk Making Billions With 5-Hour Energy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3572596 - Feb 2012 (3 comments)
Also:
Creator of 5-hour Energy Wants to Power Homes with Bikes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357663 - Oct 2015 (20 comments)
Creator of 5-hour Energy Wants to Power Homes with Bikes
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10357663
Oct 2015 (20 comments)
Creator of 5-hour Energy Wants to Power Homes with Bikes
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/151006-en...
From his Wikipedia:
Bhargava is a member of the Giving Pledge campaign.[22] In 2015, he pledged to give 99% of his wealth to philanthropic causes.[20] His foundations include the Hans Foundation[1][23] and Rural India Supporting Trust.[24] In 2016, Bhargava told National Geographic that he planned to distribute 10,000 of his stationary, power-generating bikes to rural homes and villages in India.[14]
In 2013, Forbes reported Bhargava's net worth to be $1.5 billion, but he was dropped from its list of billionaires in 2014.[8]
It's not Forbes, it's just a random contributor writing clickbaity articles for the $.
Forbes is trash and is closer to Medium in the way it is structured than to a typical news media site. It's generally just random contributors. You can see from the URL (forbes.com/sites/[contributer-name]). There are thousands of contributors with various incentives.
Forbes’ staff of journalists could produce great work, sure. But there were only so many of them, and they cost a lot of money. Why not open the doors to Forbes.com to a swarm of outside “contributors” — barely vetted, unedited, expected to produce at quantity, and only occasionally paid? (Some contributors received a monthly flat fee — a few hundred bucks — if they wrote a minimum number of pieces per month, with money above that possible for exceeding traffic targets. Others received nothing but the glory.)
As of 2019, almost 3,000 people were “contributors” — or as they told people at parties, “I’m a columnist for Forbes.”
https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/an-incomplete-history-of-f...
Edit: It appears the Hans Foundation is doing some things, at least if their annual report [1] is to be believed. Looking at the graphs at the end, their total budget was somewhere around $45MM USD for FY2022-2023 (but there are two graphs which seem to have different numbers, among other problems).
[1] https://thehansfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/THF...