Analysis | How Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried and the Liver King … – Toronto Star

On the day the Liver King came clean and confessed to all his wounded Primals that his body was not the product of liver alone, Elon Musk, the worlds richest man, released online what he called the Twitter files, an investigation by two anti-woke journalists into Twitters supposed bias against conservative voices.

The Liver King, a 45-year-old supplement salesman born Brian Johnson, has the body of a very red and very veiny action figure. He looks, from his neck to his toes, engorged, like the Statue of David, but shorter, meatier and with bigger quads.

For the past two years, Johnson has made himself ubiquitous online preaching what he calls the Nine Ancestral Tenets, a life system that includes eating raw liver (as well as testicles and other organ meats), exercise and buying Liver King supplements.

The Nine Ancestral Tenets do not include anabolic steroids, and the Liver King, despite some rather compelling evidence to the contrary (a body like a fat-free sausage pumped with too much blood that also, somehow, has abs) had always insisted his physique was the exclusive product of nature, hard work, and liver.

The question has always been do you take steroids? Do you take PEDs?, Johnson said on a podcast in October. The answer to that is no. Ive always told the truth. I still tell the truth.

Of course, he wasnt telling the truth.

In late November, a rival bodybuilding influencer posted an hour-long video on YouTube detailing the Liver Kings extensive performance enhancing drug regime. Johnson wasnt just on anabolic steroids, according to emails Johnson himself had sent to a fitness consultant. He was also on testosterone replacement therapy and about $15,000 a month in pharmaceutical-grade human growth hormone.

The revelation wasnt a surprise exactly. The Liver King is a 45-year-old man built like a meat sculpture perpetually on the brink of bursting. His body was so self-evidently the product of pharmaceutical help that even Joe Rogan, Americas most credulous man, never believed the Liver Kings all-natural claims. (Hes got an ass filled with steroids, is what hes got, Rogan said last year on his own podcast.)

And yet, on Dec. 2, when Johnson admitted on his own YouTube channel that yes, hed been lying all along, it still came as something of a shock. We have become so used to self-evident lies in public life that a confession, any confession, no matter how hedged or begrudging, now seems like a revelation.

The Liver King dodged, sure. He deflected. He told his fans (or his primals as he calls them) that the topic was complicated as f--, but that hed done it all for them.

He did all this shirtless, sure, while sitting on a throne. But in the end, he did let reality stand. The base premise of his business, he admitted, is a lie. You cant look like Liver King through liver, lifting and supplements alone. You need drugs to do it too.

The Liver Kings founding grift began to unravel in late November, about a month after Musk took full control of Twitter, a company he bought for $44 billion (U.S.) in equity and debt and has proceeded, ever since, to run into the ground.

Musk has long been a polarizing figure. He is likely the most famous American carmaker since Henry Ford. He builds workable rocket ships and wants to colonize Mars. So when he overpaid for Twitter (the company probably isnt worth much more than its $13 billion in debt, a credit analyst told the Wall Street Journal in November) it was reasonable to assume Musk had some kind of plan to turn it around.

That assumption isnt reasonable anymore. Since taking Twitter private, Musk has slashed about half the companys 7,500 employees, alienated many of the advertisers responsible for 90 per cent of Twitters revenue, and brought back virtually all the most toxic users, including white supremacists, misogynists, and violent conspiracy theorists, that the sites previous owners had spent the last several years culling (mostly in an effort to keep large corporate partners on side.)

Musk himself, meanwhile, has increasingly embraced the online persona of a mewling hard-right troll. In one 48-hour period recently, he tweeted that his pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci, was booed offstage at a Dave Chappelle show in San Francisco and then tweeted The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters in reply. Later that week, he promoted QAnon, a deranged and dangerous conspiracy theory, to his 121 million followers.

For Musk watchers, the increasingly obvious had, by mid-December become the impossible to ignore. Musk does not have a brilliant plan to resurrect Twitter. He is not an iconoclast or free thinker or a business genius who cannot fail. He is just a bad person with a lot of money who is tearing down a company that, for all its flaws, still brought in more than $7 billion in revenue last year, for no better reason than because he can.

Musk is a signal example of what Ive come to think of this year as The Liver King Capitalists. Hes a leader who has been showing us for a long time exactly who he is, but its only in the last months of 2022 that weve begun to take him at his word. Musk has always been a troll. The Liver King has always been on steroids. There is no Galaxy Brain solution to the problems here. The obvious is obviously real.

And there is no one in business who better exemplified that ethos this year than Sam Bankman-Fried. The disgraced founder and ex-CEO of the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Bankman-Fried was worth about $21 billion on paper in September. Today he says hes worth nothing at all.

The thing about Bankman-Fried, though, is that he never really hid who he was. He didnt pretend to be anything other than a child playing a game with other peoples cash. When he sat down at a pitch meeting at Sequoia Capital last year, he was literally playing a video game on his laptop. Sequoia still gave him $200 million.

Attracted to a founder they saw as visionary, investors put aside customary oversight safeguards when backing FTX, the Wall Street Journal wrote in November, which earlier this year was valued at $32 billion.

Today, Sequoias stake in FTX has been written down to nothing. The exchange declared bankruptcy in November. On Dec. 13, Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas and charged in the United States on multiple counts of wire fraud.

He wasnt doing anything revolutionary, it turns out. He wasnt changing the way money worked, or breaking free currency from the dictates of the state. He was, according to U.S. federal investigators, running the oldest financial scam there is: Taking investors cash and spending it on himself and his other companies. As FTXs new CEO told U.S. Congress in December, it was a case of old-fashioned embezzlement.

Theres a theory in pop psychology that when someone shows you who they are, you should believe them the first time. But in big business, and especially in tech, it can be so easy to come up with reasons why someone is more than what they first appear.

People want to believe the obvious lie. They want to think they can get the wild returns of crypto without the risk of an unstable and unregulated marketplace. But you cant. They want to believe that by eating raw liver you can have the body of a cartoon Viking. But you cant. They want to think that the once richest man on earth wouldnt spend $44 billion destroying a platform just to troll the Libs. But he did.

Sometimes a grift is just a grift. Sometimes the obvious, is obviously real.

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Analysis | How Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried and the Liver King ... - Toronto Star