Superlatives are like siren songs to the middle of the bell curve, promising a brush with something special or extreme.

For marketing, they work like magic. Plenty of subpar restaurants stay in business by selling what someone has declared the “hottest” chili, the “tallest” stack of pancakes, or the “biggest” burger, no special culinary talent required. Small towns can claim fame by constructing comically oversized objects like the “World’s Largest” mailbox, cuckoo clock, or ball of twine. In fact, the “World’s Largest Ball of Twine” is so successful that America boasts at least three: in Darwin, Minnesota; Cawker City, Kansas; and Branson, Missouri.

But there can be serious downsides to being tagged with a superlative, and the inevitable influx of thrill-seeking masses that follows. Nowhere on Earth is this more obvious than on its highest peak, Mt. Everest.

Every spring, when climbing season begins in the Himalayas, there are stories about the “traffic jam” on Everest, as hundreds of visitors take a crack at the mountain. Some are seasoned climbers, but the vast majority are amateurs, driven by a desire for bragging rights and maybe some “likes” on social media. Their exploits are made possible by an extensive industry of sherpas, other local guides, supply providers, and trained medical and emergency personnel.

While the steady stream of inexperienced mountaineers (typically paying $10,000s to over $100,000 each) has helped support Nepal’s economy, it has also left a devastating mark on a natural wonder. Photos abound documenting the extensive piles of trash — discarded oxygen tanks, food wrappers, water bottles, and God knows what else — scarring the scenery. There are also frozen remains of some unlucky climbers themselves. They serve as a reminder that the danger in scaling Everest is actually real, not just hype invented for tourist brochures.

With only a few routes to the summit doable for non-experts, crowds directly compound the risk. The air is so thin above 26,000 feet, the so-called “Death Zone,” that people’s bodies start breaking down from oxygen starvation, the brain swells, and the heart and lungs grow strained. Having to wait too long in line can literally kill you.

Of course, a fair number of the amateurs don’t make it far enough up the mountain to be exposed to those risks. Estimates vary, but available data indicate that at least a third of would‑be summit-seekers turn back early, often before setting foot in the Death Zone. The reasons range from sudden storms and illnesses, which can derail even seasoned mountaineers, to problems concentrated among the least experienced: inadequate gear, exhaustion, and altitude sickness. That context creates a different kind of vulnerability, apart from the elements: Rookie climbers become easy pickings for con artists.

*****

One could argue that I have no business poking around in the dealings of Everest adventurers. Apart from casual day hikes, I do not climb mountains. I have zero desire to spend weeks dragging gear up treacherous paths and sleeping in a frigid tent in pursuit of a summit. But I do find stories of these rigorous journeys compelling, and creative fraud in exotic locales even more so. That’s probably why a recent headline about the Everest scam grabbed my attention. I might not need to scale the mountain, but I did need to get to the bottom of whatever deeds were being orchestrated on it.

I first glimpsed the story in one of my Google alert emails, an April 2, 2026, piece from the UK’s Independent: “Everest guides accused of poisoning foreign climbers to force fake rescues in $20m scam.” According to the article, Nepali authorities had criminally charged 32 people in a case claiming widespread fraud by tour operators, who had allegedly conspired across the climbing ecosystem to stage hundreds of unnecessary helicopter rescues for insurance money. In some cases, complicit climbers may have agreed to take part in exchange for cut-rate expeditions. However, the Independent focused on the more scandalous claims involving unknowing participants: those who were allegedly poisoned.

According to the article, some guides staged the need for rescues by "lacing food with large amounts of baking soda,” uncooked chicken, or rat droppings, or giving some climbers “medications with excessive amounts of water.” This apparently led to nausea, dizziness, body aches, and other symptoms that mimicked or worsened existing altitude sickness, which the guides allegedly contended must be handled through emergency evacuations via helicopter. (Experts generally say the cure is simply to walk down and rest, not to summon a chopper.)

Before you ask, yes, I looked it up — you can get sick from consuming huge amounts of baking soda or overhydrating in a physically demanding environment without maintaining an appropriate salt balance. But that said, this information still left me with questions. First of all, baking soda has a very off-putting bitter taste. Shouldn’t a substantial amount of it in food be noticeable, even if the altitude messes with your senses a bit? Also, how much water would the guides have to push on trekkers to mess up their body chemistry? Liters? Both situations seem like they should raise red flags in any reasonably aware and skeptical person. (We will assume the dangers and grossness of uncooked chicken and rat droppings are even more obvious.)

Plain as day, I could see a plausible, unspoken narrative operating in the background: These amateur climbers, who came by the dozens, may have had no mountain sense and put their full faith in these guides, eating whatever gross-tasting food was served to them and following even the most counterintuitive instructions, like, “Here, if you’re feeling queasy, drink this entire two-liter bottle of water right now.” They might not have even done basic homework before embarking on the trek up the world’s highest peak; a cursory Google search could tell you how to fix altitude sickness. Maybe they didn’t express skepticism because they didn’t know enough to have any.

So I was torn: Clearly, insurance fraud and, even more so, poisoning people were serious crimes and moral wrongs. But was I supposed to feel sympathy for these “victims,” who had apparently made themselves into such easy marks?

****

It turned out that this alleged scheme had existed in some form for several years, with stories dating back to 2018.

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A One-Way Ticket

Just hours after I hit “publish” on Part II of this series, the man at the center of an alleged $220 million cattle fraud who had gone on the run, leaving his wife to face a criminal indictment alone, was caught at Los Angeles International Airport.

According to federal authorities, he was apprehended by US Customs and Border Protection at 11:45 am on March 9, 2026. Public records don’t say where Link had been coming from or where he was headed. But they do make clear where he ended up: in federal custody. The following day, in Los Angeles federal court, a magistrate judge ordered him permanently detained, finding him a flight risk, with no possibility of bail.

I checked the US Bureau of Prisons database; he was listed as an inmate at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, a sleek fortress with slots for windows and a stack of cage-covered recreation decks. He would remain there until transferred to a facility in Northern Texas, where his criminal case was ongoing. From my experience as a journalist covering white-collar crime, I knew he was unlikely to emerge as a free man again for years — possibly many, if convicted and sentenced to a lengthy term.

Because BOP restrictions and court orders often limit contact between co-defendants, Link’s wife, Tia, was unlikely to receive permission to visit him. Their lawyers would almost certainly discourage them from writing, emailing, or speaking on the phone. Conversations would be recorded, scrutinized, and possibly used as evidence.

For the foreseeable future, the couple might only interact through looks exchanged across the courtroom, where he would sit, already judged in many eyes as, at minimum, a coward.

It was a humbling fate.

The “Ghost Herd”

Interestingly, records filed by investigators don’t paint Link as eager to head for the hills when his cattle investment company, Agridime, ran into trouble. They depict the opposite: Link stood his ground, seemingly committed to doing whatever he could to keep the business afloat. Unfortunately, as the documents allege, that included lying to investors.

After its founding in 2017, Agridime operated for several years, apparently doing as promised — allowing investors to purchase heads of cattle for $2,000 each, then delivering returns when the animals were eventually slaughtered and sold for meat. It’s possible some investors received the generous payouts the company advertised, of 15% to 32%, from honest practices.

But the wild swings in the cattle market during 2020 — resulting from drought, pandemic-related labor shortages, and the shuttering of the restaurant industry — proved too much for the small, young business to bear. Agridime would have been hemorrhaging cash as it struggled to both purchase cattle and sell meat at reasonable prices, while also paying investors on a promised schedule. Facing imminent failure, Link and his colleagues allegedly took a dangerous step in January 2021: they started selling contracts for cattle that didn't exist.

Federal investigators traced the shift to that same month, when Link and his colleagues continued meeting with investors, offering the usual pitch of guaranteed returns on cattle purchases. But when the funds flowed in, some as little as $10,000, some as much as $2.7 million, the money allegedly went elsewhere. According to prosecutors and securities regulators, it went into Agridime’s operations, to repay loans, into Link’s and other employees’ pockets, and — most critically for the “Ponzi scheme” label — to pay previous investors.

When investors expressed concerns and demanded proof of their purchases, Link and others at Agridime allegedly supplied electronic tag information for real, living cattle. But the same tag information for the same animals was allegedly provided to multiple investors simultaneously, essentially using a relatively small number of actual cattle to fabricate an entire “ghost herd.”

Based on the amount of money owed to investors in 2024, Agridime should have owned somewhere between 28,000 and 58,000 head of cattle. However, a receiver appointed by a federal judge found only 6,500.

Walls Close In

In the abstract, treating cattle as an investment probably makes sense. Sitting down in a restaurant, about to bite into a juicy hamburger, the average city dweller rarely spares a thought for how it got there. Similarly, driving along a rural highway, passing a herd of cattle grazing in a field, you might see them as interchangeable, sleepy-looking sources of more hamburgers.

But raising animals, especially huge ones of 1,000 pounds or more, and getting them slaughtered and sold is a complicated venture. Unlike piles of metal, agricultural products like grain or vats of petroleum, animals don’t sit still. They must be fed and cared for. They may be shifted between multiple lots and pastures throughout their short lives. Sometimes they get sick and die, or escape entirely.

For an investor, taking Agridime’s deal even under the best circumstances was far riskier than the company let on. Due diligence was virtually impossible for a third party located hundreds or thousands of miles from a herd, especially without any knowledge of the cattle industry.

Because of these blind spots, securities and commodities regulations are often found to apply when companies solicit passive investments, even in something as tangible as a cow or a steer. By 2023, state regulators in Arizona and North Dakota had identified this fatal flaw in Agridime’s model: the company wasn’t registered, anywhere, as a securities broker, despite selling what the regulators viewed as unregistered securities. Both agencies issued cease-and-desist orders.

Doubling Down

Link and his colleagues didn't let adverse orders from state regulators slow them down. As alleged by federal authorities, they kept selling mostly fictional head of cattle, with Link meeting personally with numerous investors while his wife, Tia, allegedly helped make assurances in person and over the phone.

By August 2023, months after both Arizona and North Dakota had ordered the company to stop, Tia was still allegedly working phones and email chains, telling one prospective investor that Agridime had just sailed through a USDA audit and was in regulatory compliance. When another investor wrote to ask whether it was truly "guaranteed that one year from now you will pay me $5,500," her reply, according to the indictment, was three words: "Yes, that is correct."

The group allegedly falsified dates on purchase records for cattle, making it appear that animals had been purchased promptly with investor funds when the money had already gone elsewhere — including to cover company costs and personal expenses, among them a $528,000 property for the Links in rural Missouri, what was probably a home, and more than $11 million paid to Link and others involved in the business as salaries and commissions.

Amid continuing problems securing enough inventory, Agridime allegedly persuaded a handful of local ranchers to “consign” their animals to the company, giving Agridime access to live cattle. Agridime allegedly promised the ranchers it would pay to feed the animals and have them slaughtered, returning a share of the profits. According to court documents, including filings submitted by the ranchers themselves, they never received any funds from the company.

Following the state's cease-and-desist order, Arizona’s security regulator brought an additional enforcement proceeding against Agridime over claims it continued to operate in the state. The US Securities and Exchange Commission filed an enforcement case against Agridime in December 2023, with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission following suit in May 2024. Corporate assets were frozen, and the company was forced into receivership.

Link’s Last Stand

Through much of the escalating crisis, Link stood his ground. He defended the company to securities regulators. He testified in a deposition, explaining his role in the founding and management of Agridime and asserting that the “buck” stopped with him and his co-founder, a Texas businessman named Jed Wood.

Fighting the cease-and-desist order, Link argued to the Arizona Corporation Commission in June 2023 that regulators had fundamentally misunderstood his business. Agridime, he contended, was “a registered and bonded livestock broker and market agency” operating squarely within the USDA’s existing regulatory framework — not a securities dealer subject to Arizona’s securities laws. He accused the state of attempting to improperly “transmute cattle brokers into securities brokers,” and denied that Agridime’s customers were investors at all. Link demanded the order be vacated and all charges dismissed. The order stood.

In an August 4, 2024, filing to the federal judge overseeing the SEC’s case, Link objected strenuously to the agency’s determination that Agridime was a Ponzi scheme, while pledging to help ensure anyone owed money by the company was paid back. The one-page document states:

Defendant Joshua Link files this Response to Receiver’s Motion for Ponzi Determination. To Mr. Link’s knowledge, Agridime conducted legitimate cattle business and was not a Ponzi scheme. Accordingly, he writes to state his strong opposition to Receiver’s Motion for Ponzi Determination. Nevertheless, Mr. Link does not oppose the relief requested in Receiver’s Motion with the understanding that obtaining this designation will assist Receiver in maximizing the value of the Receivership Estate and, in turn, work towards ensuring that Receiver will be able to pay back the purchasers of cattle contracts and any outstanding bills owed by Agridime.

The court rejected his position. Agridime was declared a Ponzi scheme by the judge on August 13, 2024.

Sifting Through Remains

In business collapses, insolvencies, and fraud cases, courts can appoint receivers to act as neutral fiduciaries, charging them with sifting through the wreckage and figuring out who is owed what — and whether any money remains to pay them. In Ponzi schemes, receivers also take on the unenviable task of clawing back payments to the lucky investors who were paid with other investors' funds.

A receiver appointed to oversee the aftermath of Agridime provided a sobering financial picture:

As of 2024, the company was found to have raised $191 million from roughly 2,100 people, a figure the Justice Department later revised upward to $220 million. At least $58 million of those funds were used to make Ponzi payments to prior investors.

A quarterly update covering the final months of 2025 was starker still. The estate had $2.8 million in cash on hand, nine properties scattered across Kansas valued at roughly $1.1 million on Agridime’s books, and approximately 12,000 pounds of frozen meat sitting in a Kansas warehouse. Investors who were “net winners” — those who received payments funded by later investors — owed a combined $15 million back to the estate. But recovering it would be a long and fraught process. A similar effort involving Bernie Madoff’s investors, for example, took 16 years.

All told, investors had lost an estimated $115 million, with uncertain prospects of ever seeing more than pennies on the dollar returned.

A Broken Trust

Having picked my way through multiple federal and state court dockets and read whatever coverage I could find, I still don’t know when Link decided to run, or what specific event pushed him to it. That bothers me. What bothers me even more is this: growing up outside of Kansas City, I probably met many people like Link, hardworking, sincere Midwesterners just trying to get ahead.

From watching videos of Link, including one of his and Tia’s 2018 wedding at a Sedalia, Missouri farmstead, I didn’t get the vibe of a high-pressure, fast-and-loose hustler. He looked kind, warm, and dependable. His alleged scheme wasn’t a siren song to the greedy at heart, but an appeal to fundamentally decent values: offering an alternative to factory farming, supporting sustainable food sources, and treating animals raised for meat with as much dignity as they could hope for.

Link’s literal indictment felt, to me, like an indictment of my own biases. Whether the business fell off the rails through bad luck or bad faith, whether Link and his colleagues made desperate decisions or cynical ones, I would have expected people who resonate with my own sense of identity to take what comes and face the music, support their loved ones, and do whatever they could to help fix what they broke.

But Link didn’t do that.

A Steer’s Last Day

One summer morning, while I was visiting my aunt’s farm, I helped her load King Richard III into a trailer to meet his end. He was a Dexter steer, the oldest in her small collection of cattle, and she had decided his day had come. He was headed to a Mennonite-run slaughterhouse, a humane alternative to large assembly-line processing plants. My aunt had carefully scheduled the trip to minimize how long King Richard III would have to wait before the Big Event. He had bad hooves, and she didn’t want him stuck for hours on concrete.

My aunt and her late husband had named him King Richard III because, like the British monarch immortalized by Shakespeare, he had congenital deformities. He was also born in winter, prompting them to think of the famous line from the play: “Now is the winter of our discontent.” It was a peculiar habit, naming animals you intended to kill for meat. But I also sensed a quiet bravery in confronting the moral consequences. A name conferred respect. Not everyone had the strength to show respect to an animal they intended to eat.​

Dexter cattle are typically smaller and more compact than standard meat breeds, like Angus or Hereford. But King Richard III had grown into a giant among his peers, the size of several refrigerators. Standing in the mud that morning, trying to corral him away from the other steers, I felt both the practical danger and my City Slicker vulnerability. When he was finally in the trailer, with the door shut behind him, I was overwhelmed with a mix of pride and sorrow. That pang, I realized, was a hidden cost of raising livestock ethically.

Now, years later, looking at Agridime’s website, I think of that day. The framework, wrapped in an emotional attachment to how things should be, was exactly what the company was allegedly built to exploit. Agridime pitched itself as a way for ordinary people to invest in beef raised on local ranches, a way to make money and feel virtuous at the same time. As I explained in Part I of this story, the feel-good venture allegedly morphed into a $220 million Ponzi scheme, leaving investors empty-handed and triggering federal indictments. One of the key figures, Joshua Link, is now a fugitive; here, I trace how Agridime started and how it allegedly went off the rails.

Mysterious Beginnings

Despite multiple government investigations and extensive court records about the company, there is surprisingly little public information about Joshua Link’s life before Agridime. This opacity is striking given his role. Documents identify him as the co-founder and Executive Director, and in a prior regulatory probe, he described himself as effectively the company’s CEO, saying that he and the other co-founder, Jed Wood, were “where the buck stops” for all major decisions.​

Court filings in the federal criminal case and related civil actions still shed no light on where Link came from or how he met Wood. What they do show is that Link and Wood organized Agridime LLC in Texas on April 13, 2017. Link, then in his mid‑20s, had clear ties to Missouri; in September 2018, he married his future co‑defendant, Tia, in Sedalia, where she had gone to high school. Over the years, he also had addresses in Gilbert, Arizona, and Hope, Kansas. Wood, by contrast, was a man in his 50s from Fort Worth, Texas, described in legal documents as Agridime’s President and Operations Director. He allegedly oversaw finances while Link drove sales.​

While the records don’t explain how the two men became business partners, their concept, on paper, sounded plausible: a way for investors to profit from cattle without doing the physical labor, while ostensibly supporting local agriculture. On its website, Agridime proclaimed “PRODUCING THE BEST MEAT FOR THE BEST PRICE. RAISED BY AMERICAN FARMERS,” with the text appearing over an image of a woman on horseback, in a cowboy hat, carrying a large American flag.

Agencies that later scrutinized the company, including the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, do not allege any fraud before 2021. Perhaps when Link and Wood launched Agridime, they believed in the model. But once the company gained a foothold, something — or someone — took a wrong turn.

The Pitch: “Everybody Wins”

Agridime started with no deep industry connections, no celebrity endorsements, and no massive initial outlay of funding. But it did have the benefit of the right cultural backdrop. The rise in “farm-to-table” dining, interest in high-quality grass-fed beef, and the idea of “using the whole animal” had flourished in the 2010s. Agridime’s pitch slotted neatly into that landscape, sounding persuasive to both investors and meat customers.

Using social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube as its primary marketing vehicles, the company successfully attracted the right attention. In 2022, a local television station ran a paid promotional interview with Link at a Gilbert, Arizona warehouse, where the co-founder claimed the company offered “the most nutrient dense protein on the planet.” Along with packages of meat, Link showcased the company’s offerings of tallow-based candles and cosmetics, which he described as a way to use “the whole carcass” and “respect” the animal.

YouTubers running investment-related channels also noticed the company’s frequent social media posts promising significant returns, which some commented on favorably. Reviewing information posted on Agridime’s website, one YouTuber posting in April 2022 offered mostly positive impressions to his audience of about 1,760 subscribers.

Although he refrained from explicitly recommending the investment, he noted the “guaranteed” return was higher than the S&P 500’s growth, adding that the company’s business model had “led them to grow rapidly since launch” and that it had established a “fully transparency and sustainable supply chain where everybody wins.” The YouTuber also repeated the company’s claims of being USDA licensed, saying that “the entire process of investment in Agridime is legally done,” that “all cattle are insured” against death loss, and that “this really gives a peace of mind for investors.”

Court documents included excerpts of the company’s marketing materials, providing a simple financial summary:

The cost per steer or heifer was $2,000, an amount that was purportedly supposed to include its feeding and care, plus meat processing costs. The cattle were supposed to yield an average of 500 pounds of beef each, sold at $6 per pound, for a total of $3,000. Of the profit, $600 was intended to go to Agridime and $300 to $400 to the investor, for a 15–20% return.

In the materials, the company states: “Respectively, we feel if we were giving much less than 15-20% return that we wouldn’t be doing right by our customers. Our aim to is to create a sustainable supply chain that we can have 100% transparency with start to finish and everybody still wins.”​

For people who wanted to feel like the kind of person who supports sustainable farming, Agridime offered a shortcut, with interest.

Rapid Rise

All told, about 2,200 investors were lured by Agridime’s promises, according to documents submitted by prosecutors. While some were agricultural professionals, most were individuals scattered across at least 14 states, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. Investors typically bought dozens of cattle each, sinking $100,000 or more into Agridime, which was likely a substantial portion of their savings. According to prosecutors, the entire operation brought in $220 million from January 2021 through December 2023.​

Through it all, Link was involved in nearly everything, including face-to-face meetings with investors, training sales staff, overseeing digital marketing, and negotiating contract terms, according to the court filings. His wife, Tia, worked closely with him as Agridime’s Marketing Director. As Agridime’s flow of investments grew, so did its operations. A LinkedIn page for Agridime lists a headquarters address in Fort Worth, Texas, and 12 employees. Its staff came to encompass a variety of administrative roles, including a financial controller, operations managers, and logistics personnel. In 2021, the company hired a North Dakota cattle broker, Taylor Bang, the owner of Taylor Bang Cattle Sales LLC. Some staff received generous compensation, particularly Bang. Regulators claimed Bang raked in almost $7 million in commissions from Agridime. Meanwhile, Link and his wife allegedly drew payments of more than $2.7 million.

Unstable Market

Most of us living in big cities don’t have to think too often about how wild swings in weather and other uncontrollable factors affect our food supply. But for small farmers and ranchers, these issues can be matters of economic life and death.​

Just as Agridime was ramping up, conditions in the cattle market were shifting against it. Drought plagued much of the Western and Midwestern U.S. in 2021 and 2022, causing the price of animal feed to soar. Hay “was like gold,” my aunt told me, noting that it often had to be transported long distances at “a hideous profit.” Inflation also pushed up prices of various farming necessities, like diesel fuel. As a result, farmers liquidated their herds. Inventory levels dropped to their lowest levels in decades, while demand for beef continued unabated, causing prices to shoot up. For anyone trying to buy thousands of animals, as Agridime claimed to be doing on investors’ behalf, that meant paying more for each head, or not getting them at all.​

Yet the company continued to tout a “guaranteed” return that supposedly covered “feeding that animal to finish,” as if these costs were static.

Problematic Math

And that brings us to Agridime’s simple return formula, which arguably should have been a big red flag for investors. Look harder at the costs involved, the probable revenue from selling meat, and most importantly the wide range of uncertainties, and the numbers start to look unrealistic.​

Graze, a trade magazine for small ranchers, gives a hypothetical cost of just buying a 700‑pound calf at $1,600+, without even accounting for feeding, transport, and processing costs. With that in mind, a flat investment of $2,000 was unlikely to go far enough. Meanwhile, an expectation of 500 pounds of meat, selling at $6 per pound, for each animal was also highly optimistic. Agriculture researchers provide examples of 1,200‑pound steers typically yielding only 470 to 490 pounds of packaged beef. (As huge as he was, my aunt told me King Richard III netted just 530 pounds.)

But how were investors to know to question the data they were shown by Link and others at Agridime? After all, most were probably just City Slickers like me.

This concludes Part II. Click here for Part III.

Far From The City Lights

Every once in a while, you stumble across a fraud story that hits close to home. In this instance, I mean that very literally.

For almost 20 years, I’ve been a New Yorker. The city’s jarring cacophony of noises, smells, and humanity resonates with my nervous system in a way that most Americans will never understand. And that’s OK. New Yorkers don’t need or want everyone to come here.

But I didn’t start out surfing urban chaos. I grew up outside of Kansas City, Missouri, a stone’s throw from pastoral-looking scenes of cows and soybean fields. Like so many Hallmark movie protagonists, I had to escape all of that for bright city lights. Yet, it’s still embedded in my soul — the sense of being in the country, with a big sky overhead and undeveloped land unfurling as far as the eye can see. It’s part of what makes me me.

As a Big City reporter, I’ve covered Wall Street schemes and corporate scandals and brushed elbows with famous journalists, celebrities, and power brokers in Manhattan courthouses. So I couldn’t help but smile a little when I saw news of a major financial crime near my hometown. It involved a Missouri man who allegedly ran a $220 million cattle scam.

Most-Wanted Cattle Man

The indictment was unsealed on Feb. 12, 2026, in Fort Worth, Texas, federal court. It charged five individuals with assorted crimes over their alleged roles in a scheme to fleece cattle investors. The group was involved in a business called Agridime, which allegedly promised to channel funds into purchasing steers on local ranchers’ farms, and provide returns of 15% to 32% when the animals were eventually slaughtered for meat.

Instead, according to prosecutors, Agridime operated as a Ponzi scheme, purchasing very few actual animals and simply repaying old investors with newer investors’ funds. The scheme, spanning multiple states including Texas, Missouri, and North Dakota, totaled $220 million from 2021 through 2023, with defendants extracting millions of dollars for themselves, according to the indictment. More than 2,000 investors ended up losing at least $115 million, prosecutors alleged.

Curiously, while four of the defendants were arrested, one remained at large. The holdout was a 30-something Missouri man, Agridime co-owner Joshua Link. News sources highlighted how he was a fugitive, providing links to his FBI wanted poster:

Nothing evokes the historic Wild West quite like a guy being on the lam, wanted for cattle fraud. The U.S. Attorney’s release, the charges, and the poster captivated me and jarred me out of my preoccupation with big-city hustlers. There was something oddly affirming, given my own background, about recognizing equally complex swindles in America’s Heartland.

At first glance, the pattern of what Link and his compatriots were accused of looked standard: overpromising, wildly under-delivering, and pocketing some of the ample cash flowing through the scheme based on these deceptions. But the documents couldn’t tell me how, exactly, Agridime had grown from nothing into an operation siphoning in hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few years. That question hooked me.

Anyone who’s ever tried to raise money for anything, be it a hedge fund, a tech startup, or virtually any other endeavor, knows it’s no easy feat getting outsiders to sink ample quantities of money into a venture with no proven track record. Winning trust often relies on shorthand signals of legitimacy, such as the founder coming from a top Ivy League school, having famous friends, being named to a “30 under 30” list, or otherwise generating media attention. Old-fashioned nepotism can work, too.

The folks at Agridime had none of those special qualities, and yet, according to prosecutors, they somehow sweet-talked $220 million out of people. This didn’t sound like the work of a country rube. Someone with the finesse of a Jordan Belfort or a Bernie Madoff had to be involved, acting as a rainmaker. Based on everything I read in the court documents, his sudden disappearance, and the cool, even stare captured in his wanted poster, I sensed the lynchpin of the alleged scheme was Link.

Tia & Josh

While there was a flurry of local news reports on the indictment and on Agridime, no journalist had taken a close look at Link. So I did. When I started poking at the threads, a dark and intriguing tangle emerged.

The indictment named five individuals, hailing from locations sprawled across the midsection of the country:

• Jed Wood of Fort Worth, Texas; charged with three counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

• Taylor Bang of Kildeer, North Dakota; charged with eight counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

• Royana Thomas of Arlington, Texas; charged with six counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

• Joshua Link, of Strafford, Missouri; charged with 10 counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and two counts of money laundering.

• Tia Link of Smithton, Missouri; charged with three counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

While Josh and Tia had the same last name, neither the indictment nor an earlier filed criminal complaint specified their relationship, whether spouses, siblings, or otherwise. Tia Link was also known as “Tia Makenzie Shane,” according to the indictment, though it did not note whether either “Shane” or “Link” was a married name. It was a small detail that hinted at a deeper backstory.

I noted their alleged residences, in Smithton and Strafford, were about two hours apart, mostly a straight shot from each other along I-65, and theoretically doable for a couple that didn’t mind commuting.

I had driven that very stretch of interstate myself many times while attending college at Mizzou, in the early 2000s. My parents were living in Ozark at the time, not far from Strafford. Brightly lit with numerous billboards for Jesus, smut shops, and anti-abortion campaigns, it was, from what I recall, a relatively easy trek.

Obviously, Item 1 for me was determining if Josh and Tia were, indeed, married. Fortunately, the answer took only one two-second Google search for “Tia Shane” and “Josh Link.” The star-crossed pair had left up their Zola wedding website.

A Labor Of Love?

The website is scant on details. It provides the basics for the Big Day — Sept. 18, 2018, in Sedalia, Missouri — links to Amazon and Target gift registries, an RSVP link, and an assortment of photos. At the time, Link was nearing 25. Tia was a couple of years younger, a former high school volleyball player for a small Christian school in Sedalia.

The website for Heritage Ranch, where the event was held, included a video of the Links’ wedding. It shows a charming but modest affair; three bridesmaids in dusty pink, three groomsmen in shirtsleeves, Tia beaming in a spaghetti-strap gown with a plunging neckline, and Josh smiling back at her lovingly in a straightforward suit and tie. Their ceremony was held amid lush greenery, and the reception in a barn strung with fairy lights.

Now, professional wedding videos typically show an idealized version of the day. A videographer who made a wedding seem unpleasant or highlighted points of tension probably wouldn’t stay in business. Even with those caveats, I noticed no obvious red flags. Guests appeared relaxed. Expressions of joy and surprise seemed sincere. Children danced. People hugged. Nothing seemed over-the-top, “too perfect” or forced.

Looking at the video, I doubt that anyone present at the scene — maybe even that happy couple — had any sense of what disastrous path this was leading toward. It seems unlikely, for instance, that any gossipy relatives were lurking in corners, taking bets on how long the marriage would last. Surely, no one guessed that the bride would end up in handcuffs and the groom a fugitive.

But judging by the timeline captured in court documents, the wheels were already in motion by the time the pair said their “I do’s.” Just a year and a half earlier, in April 2017, Josh Link had co-founded Agridime, the venture that would ultimately make him a wanted man.

This concludes Part I of “A Ponzi Scheme On The Prairie.” Click here for Part II.

CORRECTION: I accidentally misgendered the cattle pictured in the main image. Actual comment from my aunt: “Them are steers, not cows. Jeez, city people.”
The error has been corrected.

When Old AI News Gets A Rewrite

News doesn’t gain traction until it finds the right context. Social media creators understand this, and algorithms are built to exploit it. That’s why you might occasionally run across an “old” story on Instagram or TikTok repackaged as “new,” suddenly going viral.​

A prime example: North Carolina musician Michael Smith, who was arrested and charged with fraud in September 2024. Despite my fascination with novel fraud cases, I had forgotten entirely about his alleged crime—using bots to stream AI‑generated music tracks and pocket $10 million from online services. So had many people, apparently.​

When the indictment was unsealed, it got a brief flurry of press attention, mostly unsympathetic and parroting the US Attorney’s comments about victimizing “musicians, songwriters, and other rights holders”. Wired published a follow-up feature in May 2025, and then the case seemed to disappear from the media.​

The Instagram Redemption Arc

Then, while scrolling through Instagram one day in January 2026, I saw a viral post presenting the case as fresh and framing it in a very different light. The post, by an AI‑focused marketing brand, showed a cheeky AI‑generated image of robots playing music together with the headline: “Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands with AI, then Making $10M by Listening to Their Songs with Bots.” My curiosity engaged, I clicked through the avalanche of comments, gobsmacked by how overwhelmingly positive they were.​

“Don’t hate the player, hate the game 😆”​
“You’re supposed to start a band and make someone else 10M.”​
“This is literally what major labels are doing to generate stream numbers though. 🤷🏾”​
“God forbids a man has a side hustle 🤦🏾‍♀️😅”​
“When tech Startups do it to little people it’s called ‘disrupting the industry’”​
“Can someone teach me how to do this?”​
“He found a loophole. He’s a hero!!”​
And simply: “rage against the machines”.​

Public opinion rarely shifts in favor of people accused of committing white‑collar fraud. People typically view this type of crime through a lens of socioeconomic inequality and vengeance against the privileged who act out of greed. The reputational damage for the accused is instant and life-changing, even for defendants who are later exonerated. Yet 16 months after his arrest, Smith was being hailed as a kind of renegade folk hero. What had happened—and why now?​

Sixteen Months in AI Time

I have a theory. Sixteen months is a blip in litigation time, but in tech time (especially AI time) it’s eons. In that span, the AI zeitgeist shifted from “intriguing experimental tool” to “unavoidable force,” and people started to feel the negative consequences across major aspects of life: jobs replaced, and workloads ratcheted up on those who stayed, all on the premise that AI would magically increase productivity.​

At the same time, the world around us has started to feel like it’s being redesigned for robots, AI agents, and chatbots, with humans pushed to the edges. There are “dark factories” in China where robots work without a need for light. School assignments are generated by AI, completed with AI, and graded with AI, in a circular parody of education. Applicants use AI to apply for jobs while companies use AI to reject them, and “no one is getting hired.” Completely AI‑generated bands have topped Spotify charts, racking up streams from listeners who might not realize any of it was made by a human or a machine.

Bots Talking to Bots

Perhaps strangest of all, there is now a social media platform that exists solely for bots to interact. Moltbook describes itself as “A social network for AI agents” where “AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.” The “users” are agent personas whose posts and comments are generated by bots connected to Moltbook.​

Looking at the forum is a confusing, surreal experience. At first glance, it resembles any other nerdy social platform, like Reddit or Hacker News. There are feeds of posts, comments, upvotes, technical discussions, and advice.

There are even weird manifestos, petty rants, and insults.

Like with many supposedly autonomous “robots” (think of smart‑home bots like Neo), humans still hold the strings in the background. Developers write the agents’ system prompts, specify example behaviors, and decide what each agent is “there to do.” For example, despite having the capacity to use virtually any language, the agents mostly chat in English because the developer community, and most connected models are strongest in English. However, the bots do supposedly come up with their own original “thoughts.”

This also allows English-speaking humans to become spectators, which is kind of the point: to create systems that can run with minimal human friction, generating content, engagement, and value at scale, but with humans no longer the main characters.

Alongside these bizarre experiments in taking humans out of social ecosystems, worry about AI’s impact on livelihoods has been steadily rising. Sentiment has evolved from early‑2022 optimism to heightened anxiety by 2026, with most Americans now expecting AI to cause net job losses over the next decade. Surveys show majorities of workers expressing concern about AI in the workplace and HR leaders predicting broad reshaping of roles, even as many people say they’re more worried about the economy as a whole than their own specific job—for now. The sense that “the system” is rigged by and for machines is getting harder to ignore.​

Put together, these developments create exactly the context shift that Smith’s story needed. We’ve been watching AI‑powered systems normalize “gaming” the system at scale: AI‑written papers to satisfy AI‑driven grading rubrics, AI job applications aiming to placate AI resume filters, platforms full of AI‑generated content designed to please recommendation algorithms rather than people. Streaming, with its opaque royalty structures and its appetite for cheap, endless content, fits right into that pattern.​

Inside the Alleged Streaming Machine

Look at the allegations in Smith’s case, and it becomes easier to see why the Instagram crowd responded with admiration rather than outrage.

Prosecutors say starting in 2017, Smith, who is in his 50s, used bots and AI-generated songs to stream tracks billions of times on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. Prosecutors claim he partnered (allegedly by lying) with the CEO of an AI music company to release hundreds of thousands of tracks. Many of those songs allegedly had nonsense names, like “Zygotic Lanie” by “Calm Force,” designed to blend into the background of an endless catalog.​

He allegedly used thousands of fake accounts, created with fake email addresses bought in bulk, and relied on cloud servers and macros for automation. His scheme also allegedly included VPNs, family plans, and debit cards in false names to keep as many as 10,000 accounts active at once. According to prosecutors, he spread streams across a wide range of AI‑generated tracks with peculiar names to evade detection.

On paper, it reads like a classic fraud scheme: deception, automation, shell accounts, and a lot of money flowing where it wasn’t supposed to go.​ But in a world where we’ve accepted that bots will talk to bots on platforms like Moltbook while humans watch from the sidelines, and where entire industries are optimizing for efficiency gains, Smith’s alleged behavior can start to look less like an aberration and more like a version of what everyone else is already doing. Given that he started almost a decade ago, he is actually a bit ahead of the curve.

If labels and streaming services are quietly fine‑tuning algorithms, playlists, and promotions to juice numbers, why is the guy who built his own little streaming machine the villain? That was the theme echoed in many of the Instagram comments: don’t hate the player, hate the game.​

The Case Meets the Overton Window

Smith faces serious federal charges in the Southern District of New York, one of the most experienced jurisdictions in the country with white-collar fraud cases. He is accused of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy, each carrying up to 20 years in prison. He pleaded not guilty in September 2024, with bail set at $500,000.

The legal outcome will depend on evidence and statutes, but also possibly at least a little bit on how the public perceives what he did in the context of an increasingly robot‑focused world. Taking a newly minted folk hero to trial amid a wave of anti‑AI sentiment carries risks for federal prosecutors. In a world where even our social networks are testing what happens when the “users” are machines, a man accused of using bots to listen to bots can start to look like a perfectly logical extension of the systems we have built.

Whether Smith ultimately pleads guilty, is convicted at trial, or is acquitted, his case has already revealed something important: our society’s wildly diverging views on automation, depending entirely on who's doing it. When platforms and labels optimize for algorithmic gains, it's business. When an individual does the same thing, it's fraud. That double standard may have made sense in 2024 when Smith was arrested. In 2026, with bots talking to bots on social platforms designed for exactly that purpose, the distinction is harder to defend. As the Overton Window shifts, prosecutors may find themselves making an argument that the public no longer recognizes.

Or do you have other thoughts?

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There’s nothing conventionally “productive” about singing for me.

I’ll never be an “American Idol” contestant; it will never bring me financial rewards. Yet I spend several hours each week rehearsing with a chorus, learning new music, and practicing vocal techniques. Why? For the most human reason imaginable: because it’s fun.

The tech world almost completely discounts this basic human motivation (unless the fun itself is tech-related), with strange results. The other day, deep in my unmarketable musical pursuits, I opened a messaging app to coordinate with a few choir members. An AI chatbox promptly intruded, occupying the actionable portion of my screen. “Want tips on boosting your productivity?” it asked.

Besides being unwelcome, the question was unintentionally revealing. Boost productivity…how, exactly? By shaving a few seconds off a task that exists solely to support a hobby? If my time was so valuable, why was the bot getting in the way? And more to the point: productive toward what? What goal was this efficiency meant to serve?

In theory, productivity is a good thing. Most people like the feeling of accomplishing something of value, whether finishing a novel, launching a startup, or doing taxes. AI clearly offers methods to pare down busywork, leaving room for the bigger stuff: generating ideas, strategizing, decision-making, and also pleasures like socializing, daydreaming, and having fun. Again, in theory, AI should help us lead fuller and happier lives.

But it’s increasingly clear the reality is often different. Productivity has drifted from purpose. Passion and fulfillment are often left out of the conversation about work and are considered personal indulgences. The focus is on output. Downstream from Silicon Valley, where luminaries are still allowed to be intellectually expansive eccentrics with quaint habits (see Sam Altman’s enthusiasm for analog note-taking), the emphasis is on “optimization,” forward movement without direction, or as they say in tech lingo, “building,” without a direct object. What, exactly, is going on?

Lest you think I’m imagining things, there is data to support these notions sinking into our collective consciousness. Take Google Trends: searches for the word “productivity” are roughly four times higher than they were five years ago—an astonishing trajectory for such a boring term, especially considering how much chatbots have recently eaten away at traditional search volume.

The trend line for “optimization” is even more extreme, as shown below.

Of course, these curves are unsurprising given what’s on social media these days. The messages on LinkedIn and Instagram are relentless: optimize your workflow, automate your life, master every aspect of AI, or be left behind.

We know it’s self-defeating to let productivity hype spread so far, without boundaries. When “doing more, faster” becomes the highest value, human needs, feelings, and aspirations look like inefficiencies. In that sense, one of AI’s more concerning risks is making us behave like machines, rather than machines taking on human-like intelligence.

Many people who do know better are stuck, constrained by economic necessity and forced to follow shifting management directives. Others have embraced the cognitive dissonance as an opportunity, pivoting themselves into AI evangelists and thought leaders. Some note the paradox that AI's productivity gains have generated new forms of busywork (learning prompts, managing tools, “staying current”), ensuring we never actually reach that promised land of freed-up time.

Part of the impetus behind the push comes straight from Marketing 101. The promise to “boost productivity,” detached from any understanding of what users actually want, relies on a tactic behavioral economists call manufactured necessity. Like deodorant ads insisting we smell bad, AI marketing suggests that anything done without automation is slow, naïve, or irresponsible. The underlying message is not “this might help,” but “you can’t afford not to do this,” because the cost of opting out is framed as irrelevance, unemployability, or obsolescence.

But there is something deeper at work as well. Productivity, stripped of direction and elevated into a moral obligation, begins to take on the contours of a belief system. It offers simple rules, repeated mantras, and a promise of salvation in the form of relevance or future-proofing. Doubt is reframed as an excuse. Exhaustion becomes an expectation. Participation is technically voluntary, but the penalties for opting out feel existential. In other words, it becomes a cult.

Americans love cults. From the radical Puritan Separatists who arrived on the Mayflower and Manifest Destiny-related sects, to effective altruists and MLMs, our society seems to constantly crave a sense of belonging and substitutes for purpose and critical thinking. Silicon Valley, itself, has often been described as a cult, with defined sub-sects like crypto bros, biohackers, and the people who almost literally worship AI like it’s a magical entity.

The Protestant work ethic described by sociologist Max Weber in 1904 has long been interlaced with our cults, with relentless labor being cast as a sacred and idle as sinful. When salvation is uncertain, work becomes both a distraction and proof of virtue. Today’s productivity gospel inherits this tradition in secular form.

AI has intensified underlying anxieties dramatically. Faced with rapid technological change and an unknowable labor market, many people respond by putting their heads down and working harder, trusting that constant productivity will somehow confer safety. In that sense, productivity has stopped being a measure of success and begun operating as a creed.

Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising that small acts of resistance are emerging. Some millennials and Gen-Zers are returning to actual religion, possibly as an antidote to the productivity rhetoric. Some get involved in community volunteering. Others seek release in reckless pursuits (for instance, young tech workers sparring with makeshift tasers). And some people, like me, spend hours each week singing, not because it advances a career or improves a metric, but because it does neither. It’s a time to just be human.

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How do you preserve your humanity in the Age of Optimizing? Let me know in the comments below.

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You have to hand it to Eric Adams.

Nothing can sink his spirits — not staring down the barrel of bribery charges and prison time in 2024, not the indignity of begging Donald Trump to call off the Justice Department, and not being an object of derision for 8 million New Yorkers, including most who initially voted for him. He cheerfully served as mayor, right to the end of his term, despite a widespread perception that he betrayed the public trust in exchange for hotel stays and cheap airfare.

“How long until he flees the country?” a friend asked me after he left office on Jan. 1, 2026. “Immediately,” I replied. “Or as soon as he figures out where we don’t have an extradition treaty.”

But we were wrong. Adams stayed, both in the United States and involved in questionable dealings. Within two weeks of walking out of Gracie Mansion, he publicly announced a crypto venture, the “NYC Token,” intended to “combat antisemitism and anti-Americanism.” It soared within hours of launch to a $580 million market cap before plummeting as much as 80 percent. Amid the surge, a wallet tied to the token’s deployer withdrew $2.5 million, then returned a portion of the funds, according to blockchain analytics firms. In other words, the series of events resembled what crypto people call a “rug pull.”

Basically, it’s deja vu. Once again, Adams is being accused of something that, on its face, sounds comically illegal. Before, it was allegedly trading favors for freebies with the government of Turkey while serving as America’s most visible municipal public servant. Now, Adams is under renewed scrutiny over theories that he ran a version of one of the oldest investment scams in the book, the crypto equivalent of a “pump and dump.”

A sampling of recent headlines paints the narrative:

• Eric Adams’ next act is exactly what you thought it might be (Jan. 12, 2026; Politico)

• Former ‘bitcoin mayor’ Eric Adams faces $3 million rugpull allegation after issuing NYC Token (Jan. 13, 2026; Coin Desk)

• Investors cry foul over former NYC Mayor Eric Adams’s crypto launch: ‘Such an obvious rug’ (Jan. 13, 2026; Fortune)

• Crypto coin firm touted by Eric Adams denies allegations of ‘rug pull’ scam (Jan. 13, 2026; The Guardian)

• Inside the botched launch of ex-NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ new crypto token (Jan. 15, 2026; Associated Press)

• The Eric Adams Crypto Scandal Is Getting Messier (Jan. 16, 2026; New York Magazine)

As scrutiny increased, Adams has characteristically kept moving forward, unruffled, denying wrongdoing and, according to this New York Post article, getting fairly spicy with hecklers.

Along with thrusting Adams back into an unflattering spotlight, the incident has drawn renewed attention to crypto, including claims of rampant scams and regulatory attempts to rein them in. While it was essentially impossible to avoid crypto conversations just a few years ago (remember the fever dream of NFTs, for instance?), the whole roughly $3 trillion market has hummed along in the background as the topic of AI took over tech bro podcasts, online debates, and the business news cycle.

But in the meantime, things have been happening in that space, nonetheless, which may have relevance to Adams:

The SEC became noticeably friendlier to crypto

For much of the early 2020s, the SEC’s crypto policy was defined mostly by bringing sweeping enforcement actions based on the presumption that crypto offerings were almost always “unregistered securities,” and therefore violating securities laws. Under former Chair Gary Gensler, the agency filed cases against Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken, using a Supreme Court precedent from 1946. Despite the crypto industry's outcry for modernized regulations, the lawsuits kept coming, leaving companies in a constant state of uncertainty.

That posture has changed. Since 2025, the SEC has dropped or narrowed several high-profile enforcement cases and shifted its public messaging toward classification and guidance rather than blanket suspicion.

Meme coins have especially become less legally risky

Meme coins, so-called because they get hyped up or spread as jokes on social media, were previously often a target of regulatory concerns, for obvious reasons. However, in 2025, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance issued guidance that more or less gave them the green light by specifying that most do NOT qualify as securities. The guidance now treats tokens that lack profit-sharing rights, governance claims, or promises tied to managerial efforts as speculative collectibles, not as investment contracts, offering much wider latitude.

The Trump administration launched its own meme coin

Along with ushering in a new attitude on crypto enforcement, the Trump administration launched its own meme coin: $TRUMP, followed closely by a $MELANIA token. The Solana-based coins, issued days before Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, surged in value to tens of billions of dollars before collapsing sharply and shedding most of their gains. Analysts estimated the project generated hundreds of millions of dollars for Trump-affiliated holders. While there was outcry over perceived ethics and legal violations, no substantive regulatory actions were taken.

Pardoning crypto fraudsters

As part of the about-face, Trump also provided clemency to crypto criminal defendants. Most notably, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, or “CZ,” was pardoned in October 2025 after pleading guilty in 2023 to a felony for failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. The guilty plea was part of a broader $4.3 billion settlement between Binance and the US, under the Biden administration.

Fulfilling a promise to vocal libertarian supporters, Trump also pardoned Ross Ulbricht in January 2025, saving him from the multiple life sentences he had been serving since 2015 for operating the Silk Road, a marketplace that facilitated the sale of illegal goods and services using Bitcoin. While more of a political reward, the pardon also signaled a distinct shift away from the government portraying digital assets as a boogeyman synonymous with criminality.

Crypto has become less “fringe,” more mainstream

All the while, crypto has continued its migration into the financial establishment. Major banks can now be used to hold digital assets. Stablecoins operate under federal law. Bitcoin and Ether ETFs trade in portfolios alongside traditional securities. For better or worse, the crypto bros finally got the institutional acceptance they had been craving while, ironically, rebelling against institutions.

Impact for Adams

To Adams, or anyone else in similar circumstances, all these developments might signal a more permissive culture regarding crypto. But here’s the thing: fraud is still fraud.

Largely indifferent to the Trump administration’s posture, Democrat-driven state and local prosecutors have continued to pursue crypto fraud using consumer protection, money laundering, or other laws at their disposal. New York Attorney General Letitia James continues to freeze crypto assets tied to scam rings, sue firms accused of misleading investors, and secure settlements. Similarly, California Attorney General Rob Bonta has shut down dozens of fraudulent crypto websites accused of luring victims into investment scams.

Separate categories of crime that happen to involve crypto deals or crypto-related figures also remain fair game for US attorneys’ offices, such as a Brooklyn sanctions-evasion case and an Illinois money laundering case. While cases specifically citing “rug pulls” dropped off over the past couple of years, multiple defendants were sentenced to prison in 2025 in federal cases over crypto-related investment scams (examples here, here, and here).

All this has obvious implications for Adams, whose ongoing legal exposure from multiple angles remains an open question. Even after the Justice Department dropped its corruption case against him, probes focusing on his inner circle have continued.

Just this month, the federal probe was rekindled with the indictment of Adams’ City Hall liaison to public housing residents, who was accused of taking bribes in exchange for giving unfair business advantages. Although the feds are barred from rehashing the Turkey-related bribery charges against Adams, nothing stops them from bringing new charges over other alleged misconduct if the evidence supports them. The latest indictment shows interest in that area is still alive and well.

Now that he’s out of office, Adams has no more influence to trade and no “get out of jail free” card close at hand. With his crypto venture, he has handed investigators a whole new book of material to work with. We’ll see if he keeps his cheerful smile.

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For more on the previous Adams’ case, see my earlier Black Sheep post here.

If you’re looking for SMIRK, you can find the full table of contents and links to all the posts in chronological order here. Paid subscribers can access all the posts; free subscribers can access select posts. Thanks for reading!

As 2026 gets underway, AI remains the economy’s North Star. We still do not know whether it will lead us to a brave new world or off the edge of the map, into the jaws of sea monsters. But one visual signal has served to calm fears, bolstering faith that no matter what hype may be overinflating the market now, everything will turn out fine in the end: Jensen Huang and his leather jacket.

Bear in mind, this is pattern recognition more than rigorous analysis; I'm reading the vibes, not building valuation models. But markets move on confidence as much as fundamentals, and sometimes the symbols we cling to reveal more about where we’re heading than the spreadsheets do.

You see, while investors remain mostly steadfast in their grandiose visions of the future, and in their commitments to a vast AI infrastructure build-out, the voices of critics have steadily grown louder, sharper, and more sophisticated. Fields Medal recipient Terence Tao, for instance, has pointed out weaknesses in large language models, noting that they are “probabilistic” rather than “grounded” in reasoning, and can easily make mistakes that “go off the rails.” Meanwhile, trader Michael Burry of The Big Short fame has raised doubts about the financial assumptions underpinning the boom, placing a contrarian bet against AI in late 2025.

These doubts touch nerves because so much of the AI boom, and by extension so much of the broader economy, rests on future promises, optimistic projections, and business models that are still searching for profitability. Yet through all the bluster, noise, and increasingly unsettling questions, investors have largely stayed the course, reassured on some psychic level by Huang.

If you are not familiar with him beyond a vague flicker of recognition as a “tech guy in a leather jacket,” it is worth establishing who we are talking about. Jensen Huang is the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, a specialized computer chip maker whose products were once used most notably in video gaming and are now indispensable to AI. Since ChatGPT introduced most of us to generative AI in 2022, Nvidia’s trajectory has been nothing short of astonishing. In three years, annual revenue surged from roughly $27 billion to well over $130 billion, and the company’s market capitalization ballooned into the trillions, at times surpassing even Apple, Microsoft, and other tech behemoths.

Huang himself is also a remarkable success story. Born in Taiwan, raised in Thailand, and educated in Kentucky, Oregon, and at Stanford, he brings a global perspective paired with the bold sensibility of an American industrialist. Far from being a green newcomer to tech, Huang is in his early 60s, having launched Nvidia in the 1990s while hanging out at a Denny’s restaurant. He is battle-tested, having shepherded the company through multiple economic cycles, including a near-bankruptcy after the dot-com bubble burst.

On top of all that, and here is where my theory comes back into view, Huang really does have a thing for wearing leather jackets. As the AI bubble surged, he has been seen wearing them everywhere: in the business press, at tech symposiums, on industry podcasts, the Joe Rogan Experience, and in numerous selfies with fans on social media (see below).

Amid the exponentially intensifying spotlight, it is hard to fault Huang’s choice of fashion armor. Leather jackets have been cool since the days of James Dean, projecting an unflappable confidence with a hint of youthful rebellion. Perhaps that is why Huang, an outlier in Silicon Valley’s cult of youthful hotshots at the cutting edge of innovation, first defaulted to the jacket, as a way to seem young and hip.

But something more powerful, and more concerning, has begun to happen as Nvidia has become increasingly aligned with the fate of AI itself. Investors have started to put weight in the jacket as a symbol, a stand-in for operational competence amid a swirl of uncertainty, and a visual confirmation that someone grown up has a firm grip on the controls.

To be sure, other tech giants have recently provided their own steadying signals. Google's Gemini advances and search integration, for instance, have reminded investors that the AI ecosystem extends beyond any single chipmaker. But none have offered quite the same visceral reassurance as Huang in his jacket.

As one trader joked recently on social media (below), the market seemed to be waiting once again for “one man and his leather jacket” to save it.

Meanwhile, a Wired journalist noted the shift from “leather jacket” to “shiny crocskin,” asking pointedly, “Bubble indicator?”

Cheeky though these remarks may be, they carry a kernel of truth. As the AI boom swelled, Nvidia became increasingly enmeshed in it, not only providing chips but also financing the purchase of more of them. A Bloomberg graphic illustrating the round-trip nature of these transactions went viral last year, raising more than a few eyebrows.

One starts to wonder whether Huang’s optimism, conveyed symbolically by the jacket, has become one of the main forces holding the ecosystem together. How much of the S&P 500 is currently propped up by appearances of Huang in his leather jacket? The effect is impossible to measure, but it is probably larger than many would like to admit.

Huang has not only kept showing up in leather jackets, he has also continued to issue market-stimulating predictions and soundbites, often based on little more than his own confidence. Among them:

• “In 2-3 years, 90% of the world’s knowledge will be generated by AI.” [podcast excerpt]

• “Intelligence is about to be a commodity.” [speech to the UK’s Cambridge Union]

• “It's very likely that human robots are going to be robots that we can deploy into the world relatively easily..and I think this is likely to be the next multi trillion dollar industry." [Bloomberg TV interview]

• “I’m improving the performance by a factor of 10 times each year, but demand is going up by a factor of 10,000, a million times each year.” [CSIS fireside chat]

• In about 10 years, the computational capabilities of AI systems will be a million times bigger than they are today. [paraphrase, Stanford SIEPR Economic Summit]

• “AI will create more millionaires in 5 years than the internet did in 20… I’ve created more billionaires on my management team than any other CEO in the world.” [All-In podcast]

• “The AIs are smart enough that everybody wants to use it, and we now have two exponentials happening at the same time — models needing exponentially more computing power and exponential demand growth for their use.” [CNBC’s “Squawk Box”]

Unsurprisingly, this kind of commentary has not only helped support stock prices, it has also seeded think pieces, LinkedIn posts, and tech articles, creating a cultish feedback loop that drowns out critics, at least temporarily. Having noticed this phenomenon, I find it profoundly unsettling. No matter how much talent, vision, and discipline Jensen Huang brings to the table, he cannot hold a bubble together all by himself, even if it sometimes appears he is trying to do exactly that.

In a rare flash of candor, Huang has acknowledged his own anxieties about Nvidia’s importance to the broader economy. According to Business Insider, he told employees at a recent all-hands meeting that “the whole world would’ve fallen apart” if Nvidia missed earnings expectations, adding that “we’re basically holding the planet together.”

The full quote is striking:

If we delivered a bad quarter, if we're off by just a hair, if it just looked a little bit creaky, the whole world would've fallen apart. There's no question about that, OK? You should've seen some of the memes that are on the internet. Have you guys seen some of them? We're basically holding the planet together — and it's not untrue.

The comments escaped widespread public attention, but a few observers who noticed them found them alarming. One poster on X summed it up bluntly: “That’s not confidence. That’s panic.”

Huang, as an experienced CEO, undoubtedly senses the hazards ahead, and like the captain of a ship bound for uncharted seas, is doing his best to lift collective spirits. The jacket plays an implicit role, much like a sea captain’s uniform. But uniforms cannot calm the sea, and confidence alone cannot resolve the structural questions investors have chosen, for now, to ignore. A moment may lie ahead when even that confidence falters, and if it does, there will likely be visual tells.

As the year unfolds and we see what it brings for the economy and for AI, it is worth keeping an eye on Jensen Huang. Want to know whether trouble is around the corner? See if he keeps wearing the leather jacket.

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CORRECTION: Earlier, I misstated Nvidia’s revenue in 2022. Here are the company’s revenue figures from 2020 - 2025, and you can refer to the company’s earnings releases (linked) for confirmation:

2020: $11 billion
2021: $17 billion
2022: $27 billion
2023: $27 billion
2024: $61 billion
2025: $130 billion

This publication will examine cultural themes and motives that contribute to lying, cheating, stealing, and related self-inflicted disasters; the impacts of those events; and the people who play starring roles in these dramas. I find these tales both cautionary and fascinating; I hope you will, too.

If you’re looking for SMIRK, you can find the full table of contents and links to all the posts in chronological order here. Paid subscribers can access all the posts; free subscribers can access select posts. Thanks for reading!

Business Genius Barometer?

I realize it was shocking when someone like me — a nerdy, fact-driven, experienced journalist — publicly admitted to falling in love with Martin Shkreli years ago. But consider this: So did Forbes.

The same publication that bills itself as a barometer of business genius named him to its exalted “30 Under 30” list in December 2012. It called him an “activist hedge fund manager specializing in healthcare stocks” who also “founded a biotech focused on rare diseases.” It turned out those ambitions were backed largely by Martin’s outsized bravado, a handful of wealthy investors he had beguiled, and a complex game of robbing Peters to pay Pauls. He spent several years in prison.

Martin, of course, is just one example of a Forbes-anointed wunderkind who ended up in disgrace or convicted of crimes. The magazine has acknowledged a “30 Under 30” Hall of Shame, which also included FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, his co-defendant and ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison, AI education startup founder Joanna Smith-Griffin, real estate fraudster Nate Paul, and the founder of failed mobile payments startup, Lucas Duplan. Now-incarcerated young Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes wasn’t officially a “30 Under 30” honoree, but she graced Forbes’ cover and featured at its Under 30 Summit, so she arguably belongs in that group, too.

And now, Charlie Javice has joined this ignominious club. Once hailed for creating Frank, a college-aid startup JP Morgan purchased for $175 million, she has now been sentenced to 7 years in prison for fabricating its main selling point: explosive growth. Frank claimed to have more than 5 million users when JP Morgan bought it in 2021. The reality was closer to 300,000.

Apart from embarrassing the bank, Javice revived the perennial online wisecracks about Forbes’s “30 Under 30” serving as a cheat sheet for future true-crime documentaries. But the memes and the snark belie a deeper, toxic mythology. The media merely mirrors what our society and investor class idolize: youth, effortless genius, and flashy, frictionless growth. The folly of Forbes is that the magazine reflects, amplifies, and even celebrates a system that rewards storytelling over substance and fixates on the same delusions that make some frauds and failures inevitable.

To pass the bank’s due diligence, Javice hired a data scientist to generate millions of realistic-looking profiles for student aid applicants. JPMorgan discovered the deception only after the acquisition, when it sent a marketing email blast to Frank’s supposed 4 million users and saw that only a tiny fraction were deliverable. Javice was convicted in March 2025 of wire, bank, and securities fraud, along with conspiracy.

But Javice’s individual story matters less than what it reveals about the system that elevated her in the first place.

True, catastrophic frauds and blow-ups represent a small (though disproportionately visible) portion of the thousands of Forbes honorees. It’s also true that a fair percentage of paradigm-shifting Silicon Valley mega-hits (i.e. Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple) were founded by a certain type of young, brash, rule-bending hotshot. However, the cultural obsession with young, rapidly rising superstars creates unnecessary pressure that pushes some toward ethical shortcuts. We’ve taken a handful of wild edge cases and recrafted them into baseline expectations, creating a generation of founders who feel they must achieve similar trajectories or risk being cast as permanent failures.

While Forbes reflects these broader cultural values, it also actively shapes them. Being named to the “30 Under 30” opens doors to funding, partnerships, and media attention that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Intentionally or not, the list gives selected founders a stamp of legitimacy that can paper over red flags investors might otherwise notice.

Though Javice defrauded a bank rather than VCs, she was elevated by the same cultural forces that produced Bankman-Fried, Holmes, and the rest. Understanding those forces, including the biases, preferences, and pressure points of the startup ecosystem, might help explain why so many of our supposed best and brightest end up cheating, stealing, or committing epic errors of judgment.

The Tropes Of Startup Magical Realism

Granted, I’m just a journalist who mostly covers legal cases. I’m not a founder or a venture capitalist, and I’ve barely set foot in Silicon Valley. But I’ve seen the messy aftermath of plenty of startups going sideways, including blame games, broken trust, and long-simmering tensions suddenly exploding. From my vantage point, I think I can assemble a roughly accurate picture of some of the psychological underpinnings of the ecosystem.

Namely, investing is often compared with gambling. If buying stocks is a bit like playing blackjack (skill matters, but luck still decides the hand) then venture investing is closer to buying lottery tickets in bulk. The odds of winning are infinitesimally small, but the potential payout is so insanely alluring that no one can resist believing they might hold the winning numbers. And unlike actual lotteries, when these bets fail, the collateral damage extends far beyond the gamblers, to employees suddenly laid off, customers left holding worthless products, and markets that lose faith in innovative products.

Sure, VCs and acquirers of early-stage businesses examine financial metrics and construct elaborate rationales to give their decisions a veneer of logic. But at the end of the day, there are too many unknowns to rely purely on data. When placing bets on startups, emotion inevitably creeps in. Symbols, totems, and tea leaves end up doing as much work as spreadsheets, even for the most analytical investors.

These superstitions aren’t lucky socks or crystals (I assume). They’re qualitative or quantitative factors (real or imagined) that supposedly indicate a company is on the verge of exponential growth. To believers, these signals promise a return on investment at the very least, and at best, the next “Uber” or “Airbnb.” For those who guess right and hit it big, the rewards include not just fabulous wealth but the sort of legendary status that guarantees speaking gigs, seed funds, and podcasts for the rest of their natural lives.

Some examples of the supposedly predictive patterns and symbols VCs seek out:

Hockey-stick charts

Common sense and philosophical wisdom tell us that success takes a variety of forms; that the proverbial tortoise can beat the hare; and that there are many paths up a mountain. These are not the messages that win over the investor community, however. Investors want to see revenue or user figures moving in exactly one direction: up. The steeper and sharper the curve, the better.

Investors accept that it might take some time for the Next Big Thing to catch on, and that growth could be flat for a period of years before an inflection point occurs (such as with Amazon, in particular). But once that happens, there should be no turning back, or so the model of Past Big Things tells them. Expecting every promising tech startup to replicate those rare alignments of timing, product, and market is more than a little absurd.

Founder protagonists

Even the most measured, critical thinkers among us can be seduced by a compelling narrative. Investors, being only human, want to fund a story, not just a product or a business. And every great story needs a main character. For investors, that’s the founder/CEO.

But the traits that make for a captivating startup protagonist aren’t the same ones that drive sustainable success. The heroes of startup mythology are usually young, brash, whip-smart, eccentric risk-takers: the Ivy League dropouts, the twenty-somethings who grind nonstop and sleep under their desks, and the mavericks who “move fast and break things” no matter what chaos they cause.

Building a lasting company does require boldness and self-assurance, but it also takes humility, discipline, ethical grounding, and the ability to manage people and plan for the long term. Those virtues don’t sparkle in a pitch deck, and they rarely earn anyone a Forbes write-up.

Mystical milestones

Serious investors scoff at psychics, mystics, and numerology, yet they readily put their faith in the predictive power of semi-arbitrary financial milestones. Startup lore goes like this: the first hurdle is $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), then $5 million, then $10 million, and so on. Each round number is a rite of passage, opening doors to more funding. However, the difference between $990,000 and $1 million is almost entirely psychological.

Reality and markets are messy, governed by countless variables beyond our control. But like palm readings or tarot cards, the mythology of the numbers holds power because they offer an illusion of certainty, and a way to impose order on the unknowable. The path from $1 million to $5 million to $10 million looks smooth, inevitable, and deeply reassuring on a PowerPoint slide.

Blitzscaling as a virtue

To most bootstrap founders (indeed, to most humans), spending money you don’t have and expanding a business well beyond its means is simply bonkers. But in the startup funding world, “blitzscaling” is proof of belief in your own destiny. Under that mindset, actions that would ordinarily be considered borderline sociopathic are reframed as courageous and visionary.

The logic is simple and circular: if you are growing rapidly, you should be constantly at risk of running out of capital. Founders are told that if they move swiftly with enough conviction, the market, the team, and even the product will eventually catch up. Or, you may assume that you’re in a “winner take all” situation, and whoever dominates the market will be a trillionaire (see the current AI race). Sometimes this works spectacularly well (see: Amazon), but often flirting with disaster does end in actual disaster: namely, wasted resources, unpaid debts, and people who are suddenly laid off and unable to support themselves or their families. But who’s to say you can’t try again and fail upward?

Disruption as a purpose

Who remembers Juicero? I’m sure the venture capital industry would prefer if you didn’t. In the mid-2010s, Juicero sold $400 WiFi-connected juicers that promised fresh, effortless juice at the touch of a button. The catch was that Juicero’s juice came from pre-packaged produce pouches, not whole fruits or vegetables, and those packets could be squeezed just as effectively by hand.

Despite the absurdity, Juicero raised an astonishing $120 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins and Google’s venture arm, by pitching itself as a “disruptor” to the juice industry. But the product solved no real problem, offering no meaningful convenience or innovation, just an expensive, over-engineered machine. The business simply shut down in 2017, with no way to move forward, leaving investors nothing to show for their contributions.

Exceptions vs. Rules

Do these patterns sometimes correlate with success? Absolutely. Facebook did experience hockey-stick growth. Amazon did blitzscale and disrupt. Uber and Airbnb disrupted. The problem isn’t that these patterns never work—it’s that they work so rarely that treating them as reliable indicators is dangerous. For every Amazon, there are thousands of Juiceros. The venture capital model can absorb these losses because one massive win overcomes all the failures. But celebrating this dynamic culturally, on magazine covers and conference stages, creates a generation of founders who think recklessness is a necessary ingredient of success.

Notably, as Juicero shows, not all bad bets and manifestations of magical thinking lead to outright fraud. But both outrageously bad ideas that nonetheless raise millions of dollars in funding and “fake it till you make it” schemes have common roots: a culture that values storytelling over substance, that rewards bold claims more than verified results, and that treats due diligence as an obstacle to overcome rather than a safeguard to embrace.

Youth vs. Experience

Youth does have important advantages in the startup game, especially if the business is at the leading edge of a new, innovative industry. Young founders typically bring energy, dedication, unconventional ideas, and an appetite for risk.

But take a super-ambitious twenty-something founder, fresh out of school or freshly dropped out, and hand them a roadmap filled with milestones, metrics, and must-haves that everyone insists are essential for success. They won’t just aim to hit those targets; they’ll want to crush them. Young founders are competitive by nature, and when the spotlight shines brighter (say, after landing on a “30 Under 30” list), the pressure to win at any cost intensifies. When those goals are unrealistic or modeled on rare, lottery-style success stories, the temptation to “fudge” the data or other markers of success gets stronger.

Experience is the best antidote to that pressure, and it is the one thing every prodigy lacks. Seasoned operators know when the ground is solid beneath them, when a smooth-talking investor is speaking in empty platitudes, and when the numbers don’t make sense, no matter how you spin them. On an aggregate basis, older founders perform better than young founders, as shown clearly in research, not because they’re smarter but because they know how to brace themselves for what can go wrong.

The Real Folly Of Forbes

It’s easy to dunk on Forbes, and to some extent, the magazine has earned the ridicule. The “30 Under 30 “franchise is a self-congratulatory, credulous feedback loop between elite media and elite investors. It has been a popular feature, though, bringing desperately needed eyeballs, ad revenue, and sponsorship to the magazine as traditional readership falls. (Note: It is NOT pay-to-play, but there are lots of other ancillary economic benefits for the magazine.) Given the incentives, the “30 Under 30” section has ballooned: more categories, more honorees, more conferences. “Thirty” now means several hundred each year, and with that scale comes statistical certainty: more stars, but also more scandals.

Still, Forbes continues to hold enormous cultural sway, the kind that could be used to change the conversation. Imagine if the magazine treated caution and proven track records as virtues that were even more important than speed and spectacle. It could celebrate founders who build slowly, profitably, and ethically, who measure success in years, not funding rounds — and stop venerating founders based mostly on their youth, but on other, more meaningful metrics? That shift would require swimming against the hype, but who better to lead it than the publication that helped define what ambition looks like in the first place?

This publication will examine cultural themes and motives that contribute to lying, cheating, stealing, and related self-inflicted disasters; the impacts of those events; and the people who play starring roles in these dramas. I find these tales both cautionary and fascinating; I hope you will, too.

If you’re looking for SMIRK, you can find the full table of contents and links to all the posts in chronological order here. Paid subscribers can access all the posts; free subscribers can access select posts. Thanks for reading!

Inflated Expectations

Long ago — ok, six months ago, but feels like decades in tech years – I wrote a Black Sheep piece about an AI startup founder with a chatbot that gained rapid traction in the sports entertainment industry. But customers didn’t want to pay very much for it. So the founder, Alexander Beckman, allegedly turned to fraud.

Today, Beckman and his wife, Valerie Lau (who allegedly helped him with the fraud), are facing an ongoing criminal case and the prospect of prison. Meanwhile, the AI industry’s trillion-dollar promises of value creation have yet to yield results. Numerous other founders are undoubtedly battling pressures that could push them down the same path.

Let’s look at some recent headlines, shall we?

• WSJ, Aug. 2, 2025 – “The AI Boom’s Hidden Risk to the Economy.” The rush to build AI infrastructure is “straining companies and capital markets,” but hey, at least it’s propping up the economy while consumers pull back on spending.

• CNBC, Aug. 18, 2025 – “OpenAI’s Sam Altman Sees AI Bubble Forming.” Trying to get ahead of the inevitable, the CEO himself drops the “B-word,” and talks about “smart people” getting “overexcited about a kernel of truth.”

• AIInvest, Aug. 24, 2025 – “Massive Credit Fueling AI Boom as Debt Risks Rise.” Tens of billions are flowing into AI via…CMBS (commercial mortgage-backed securities). I feel a twinge of 2008 real estate crash deja vu.

• The Information, Sept. 5, 2025 – “OpenAI Says Its Business Will Burn $115B Through 2029.” In other words, it will consume roughly the entire GDP of the Dominican Republic. That’s just $80B more than previously forecast. No biggie.

• Motley Fool, Sept. 24, 2025 – “The Buffett Indicator and Shiller P/E Ratio Are in Rarified Territory.” Spoiler alert: The “rarified territory” is not a good sign. The article doesn’t mention “AI,” but we all know it’s the main driver behind those huge multiples.

• Axios, Sept. 25, 2025 – “Nvidia’s $100B OpenAI Investment Fuels Bubble Fears.” Capital markets strained? No problem. Papa Nvidia cuts a check. The circular nature of the transaction prompts a flurry of memes of animals eating their own tails, and concerns about “interconnectedness” in Silicon Valley and what happens “if the AI bubble pops.”

People who have been through a few popped bubbles can easily see what’s going on here. There will be at least a temporary downturn. Investors will get burned. Hard-working founders and employees will end up broke or even bankrupt if they take on debt they can’t repay. The tide will go out, and you will see (as Warren Buffett famously quipped) “who’s been swimming naked” — in other words, who’s been faking success, or possibly worse. It’s familiar terrain. But how did we get here?

Whenever the “bust” happens, your social media feeds and email inboxes will be inundated with thinkpieces from technology experts, stock market gurus, and highly credentialed academics trying to answer this question. Here is my attempt as a lowly journalist to front-run all of them by explaining what I think is the biggest problem staring everyone in the face: AI — in its current form, anyway — simply does not deliver enough value to ordinary people to justify its staggering cost.

This isn’t about whether AI will change the world eventually —it almost certainly will. This is about whether the hundreds of billions being deployed right now can be justified by the value ordinary people are experiencing right now. History suggests the answer is no, and that’s what makes this a bubble.

Trenches Vs. The Clouds

Lest I sound like a Luddite or Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist at a cloud (meme below), let me be clear that I don’t hate AI. I find generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and the like fascinating, fun, and even sometimes really helpful. I also agree with the notion espoused by many technology executives that smart people will eventually do something really amazing with these tools.

For now, this is what generative AI platforms have provided for most people. At the positive end: help with research, brainstorming, line editing, compiling or assembling data, and other tasks requiring little higher-order thinking. At the negative end: We get loud warnings about diminishing job security, paradoxically paired with heavier workloads and frustration. That’s because all the productivity gains that were supposed to magically result from adopting AI for everything have simply not happened. Quite the opposite, in many cases (see the Harvard Business Review article on “Workslop”).

Meanwhile, seemingly unaware of the chaos in the trenches, Silicon Valley thought leaders still breathlessly compare AI to every great technological innovation in human history, waxing philosophical about its alleged ability to cure cancer, solve climate change, power “hypergrowth” across all industries, and make human labor obsolete. In the long term, some of these pronouncements may be true. But they all ring fairly hollow, for now, when generative AI can’t even reliably take drive-through orders at a Taco Bell.

From Fire, To Electricity, To Internet

Silicon Valley may insist that it’s on the cusp of the next great leap, similar to humankind’s mastery of fire or electricity, or the invention of the internet. But truly revolutionary technology doesn’t need to be sold this hard. The sheer volume of AI evangelism and FOMO-based marketing pitches is evidence that organic adoption just isn’t happening fast enough to justify the investment.

Real technological revolutions don’t just happen because the technology exists and it’s cool, and has the potential to do great things, but because it creates immediately recognizable value.

For example, it’s hard to imagine many Pleistocene cave-dwellers remained wary for long after being introduced to fire, stubbornly chewing raw meat in the dark. Fire’s benefits in a survival context are obvious: It provides warmth, light, makes food more digestible, and discourages predators from sneaking up and mauling you to death. No early human needed to hear a treatise on how fire’s transformative properties would allow our species to endure an Ice Age and spread throughout the globe. They just used it. The rest is history.

Likewise, electricity was an easy sell once it could be brought, at scale, into people’s homes. There were bankruptcies and missteps along the way — streetcar schemes, failed utilities, the costly DC-vs.-AC fight — but the value of electric lighting was clear as soon as it became as simple as flipping a switch. A single live demo, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, captivated the public. More than 27 million people, over a third of the U.S. population, attended the fair to experience the glow of AC-powered incandescent bulbs. By 1900, most major cities had adopted electric streetlamps, gas lighting was in sharp decline, and the number of power plants across the country had tripled.

The internet was a bit trickier. Tethered to a bulky personal computer and a landline, it was seen as a novelty at first, used mostly for chatting on AOL, playing basic games, looking up trivia or celebrity gossip, or (of course), downloading porn (at glacial speeds). After the dot-com bust cleared away the hype, broadband took hold and e-commerce exploded. A tipping point happened: people realized they could research, shop, bank, and interact with the world without leaving their homes — and later, with the iPhone, not even their toilets.

To be sure, there are enterprise and niche applications of AI that are producing real-world value today: accelerating drug discovery, detecting fraud, helping coders write at least some boilerplate code, optimizing logistics, and streamlining certain back-office workflows. But again, revolutions (commensurate with the size of the cash bonfires going on) aren’t built on niches. They happen when value is experienced organically on a massive scale.

I could go on and talk about other paradigm-shifting technological leaps like the printing press or the steam engine, but I think my point is clear: What drives widespread adoption and fundamental shifts are the users themselves — what individual human beings find important, useful, and valuable, not what “thought leaders,” self-interested technology executives, tech bros, or pundits tell them they should care about.

My humble prediction: Until the focus returns to humans, AI’s power to reshape life as we know it will remain a hallucination.

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This publication will examine cultural themes and motives that contribute to lying, cheating, stealing, and related self-inflicted disasters; the impacts of those events; and the people who play starring roles in these dramas. I find these tales both cautionary and fascinating; I hope you will, too.

Anti-Tech Resistance

It was only a matter of time before the Luddites came for AI. Professors, it turns out, are leading the charge.

Fueled by a viral New York Magazine piece titled “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” university faculty are raising moral panic over students outsourcing their assignments to ChatGPT. The implication is that the machines are to blame.

But here’s the thing: While robots might make the process easier, academic cheating is a human problem, not a tech one.

To illustrate my point: MIT just disavowed a widely publicized study on AI and productivity. The author, 26-year-old doctoral student Aidan Toner-Rodgers—now a former doctoral student, as MIT quietly noted—allegedly fabricated the data. All of it. He may have even made up the lab where the research supposedly took place, describing it in his paper only as an “R&D lab of a large U.S. firm.”

Though loud in its tech-related ambition, his alleged wrongdoing was strictly analog, not the fault of AI. The mendacity echoed another case from decades earlier, journalist Stephen Glass, who infamously faked whole articles for The New Republic. Toner-Rodgers purportedly relied on the same basic human quality that Glass did: our desire to believe impressive lies.

*****

If you were a journalism student in the early 2000s like I was, Glass needs no further introduction. He served as one of the most emblematic cautionary tales regarding journalistic ethics, or rather, an utter lack of them. His story was adapted into a critically acclaimed 2003 film, Shattered Glass, starring Hayden Christensen. Like my peers, I watched the movie and recoiled in fascination and horror.

Yes, there have been other notable examples of sham reporting in major publications — namely, Jayson Blair in the New York Times and Janet Cooke in the Washington Post — but their actions were at least somewhat understandable, if not forgivable. Both journalists, who were Black, rapidly ascended in highly competitive, mostly-white newsrooms, where they succumbed to intense pressure to prove themselves.

Because honest reporting often falls short of top editors’ larger-than-life expectations, these reporters took shortcuts. Blair made up interviews and plagiarized material in at least three dozen articles between 2002 and 2003. Cooke won a Pulitzer in 1981 for her piece about a child heroin addict, titled “Jimmy’s World.” However, her award was revoked after she confessed under scrutiny from her editors to inventing “Jimmy.” She was also found to have embellished her resume significantly by claiming, among other things, to speak fluent French. Then-Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, a “Boston Brahmin” (AKA old-money white person) who learned French in childhood from governesses, discovered that lie by interrogating her himself.

By comparison, Glass was a fabulist in his own league. Having grown up with a pedigree that should have provided him with ample social capital and reporting knowhow — he came from a wealthy Chicago suburb, majored in politics at the University of Pennsylvania, and was editor of the student paper — he nonetheless turned to brazen fraud. Glass didn’t just make up sources and interviews; he concocted entire news events. When questioned by editors, he supplied fake notes, fake business numbers (connected to voicemail services), and fake websites. In many ways, the cover-up was more calculating and amoral than the crime.

Glass’s fakery spree came to a crashing halt in May 1998 after TNR published his piece, “Hack Heaven.” The cinematic, too-good-to-be-true article told the tale of a 15-year-old hacker who broke into a software company’s network. Instead of having him arrested, the company supposedly hired him to keep quiet, lavishing him with $250,000 in stock options, a high-end computer, a limo ride, and a trip to Disney World. Glass’s story included a scene of the boy shouting his demands to the company at a Bethesda, Maryland, conference, flanked by lawyers, executives, and PR representatives.

Although the article passed TNR’s fact-checking process, a Forbes Digital reporter, Adam Penenberg, tried to follow the story and quickly discovered it was a figment of Glass’s imagination. Peneberg found no record of the hacker, supposedly named “Ian Restil,”; the software firm, supposedly called “Jukt Micronics,”; or the convention that supposedly took place. At first, Penenberg found “Jukt Micronics” didn’t even have a website, although Glass eventually created a crude one as pressure mounted.

Spurred by Penenberg’s digging, TNR launched its own investigation, and Glass’s deception came unraveled as he made increasingly desperate attempts to “prove” his innocence by fabricating evidence. The magazine found he had faked or distorted material in 27 of 41 stories he had written for TNR. He was fired. Forbes Digital published an exposé: “Lies, damn lies, and fiction.”

******

Flash-forward to MIT in late November 2024. AI was rapidly overtaking public discourse with the US presidential election dropping out of the news cycle. The fear of robots taking over intellectual labor, taking jobs from broad swathes of the middle class, hovered like a dark cloud. Then, Toner-Rodgers, a 26-year-old economics PhD student at MIT, gave dimensions to those anxieties with perfectly calibrated research.

His paper, Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation, which he self-published on a preprint academic site, arXiv.org, attracted significant attention. The study, as you can see from the title page below, supposedly focused on an R&D lab with over 1,000 scientists in a “large U.S. firm.” It found (again, supposedly) that AI-assisted researchers made 44% more discoveries, significantly increasing patent filings and product innovations.

More concerningly for knowledge workers, the study also allegedly found that only top scientists produced the increased output with AI (meaning research firms could potentially do more work with fewer people). The research also allegedly found that AI automated “idea generation,” leaving most scientists dissatisfied with their work because of “decreased creativity and skill underutilization.”

Hailed as a breakthrough in the understanding of AI’s potential impact on the labor market, the study was publicized in, among other places, the Wall Street Journal. On Dec. 29, 2024, WSJ published an article titled "Will AI Help or Hurt Workers? One 26-Year-Old Found an Unexpected Answer.” In the article, prominent economists Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, both from MIT, praised the study. Acemoglu described it as "fantastic," while Autor stated, "I was floored.” The Atlantic and Nature also put out feature stories on the research.

However, within two months, the all-too-perfect research paper came unraveled. A computer programmer reportedly approached Acemoglu and Autor about the study in January 2025, asking about the specific AI technology involved in the study and the lab where the experiment supposedly took place, which he had heard nothing about previously. Perhaps embarrassed by their inability to answer those basic questions, the two noted economists referred the matter to MIT’s disciplinary committee, which conducted a review.

On May 16, 2025, the university announced that it had"no confidence in the provenance, reliability, or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper." The paper was taken down from arXiv (although the web-archived version remains available), and it was withdrawn from the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which had been reviewing the paper for formal publication. The WSJ briefly covered the study’s retraction.

Although MIT did not give details about the specific problems with the study or the misconduct at issue, citing confidentiality, one educated observer seized on the information and chronicled alleged signs of fraud in the research hidden in plain sight. On his Substack, The BS Detector, engineer and researcher Ben Shindel quickly posted a detailed breakdown of every red flag in Toner-Rogers’ results.

Those included the following:

The data source, a large R&D lab, was implausible. Shindel wrote: "Why would a large company like this take such pains to run a randomized trial on its own employees, tracking a number of metrics of their performance, only to anonymously give this data to a single researcher from MIT—a first year PhD student, mind you—rather than publishing the findings themselves?"

The results were too clean, too neat, and too contrived-looking. Most scientific results have at least some ambiguity or signs that they might not be statistically significant. Toner-Rodgers graphs and charts stuck to definitive, too-perfect patterns.

While not a smoking gun per se, the analysis he incorporated was also highly sophisticated for a first-year economics Ph.D., Shindel noted. He wrote: “It boggles the mind that a random economics student at MIT would be able to easily (and without providing any further details), perform the highly sophisticated technique from the paper he cites…especially in this elegantly formalized manner without any domain expertise in computational materials research.”

The scientific concepts in the research were also oversimplified to a point that may have appealed to laypeople and journalists, but would “probably drive a materials scientist insane,” Shindel wrote.

But perhaps most suspicious of all, an internet sleuth discovered (and Shindel reposted) a World Intellectual Property Organization panel decision against Toner-Rodgers over his registration of a domain that was “confusingly similar” to a major company’s trademark. The company, which filed its complaint Jan. 31, 2025, was materials firm Corning Inc. Toner-Rodgers’ offending website was “corningresearch.com.” The WIPO panel ordered that “the disputed domain name be transferred to the Complainant.”

Another tech industry observer, Mushtaq Bilal, the co-founder of an AI-powered tool for researchers, posted a tweet thread chronicling the Toner-Rodgers debacle and Shindel’s takedown. In one of his tweets, Bilal commented: “It reminds me of Stephen Glass, a journalist at The New Republic, who would cook up fake quotes and sources for his articles.”

*****

The Toner-Rodgers case reveals what institutions are still reluctant to say out loud: that cheating, whether by undergrads outsourcing term papers to ChatGPT or PhD students fabricating research, isn’t a tech problem. It’s a reward problem. Our prestige economy demands polish, confidence, and results that align with a mainstream narrative. So people—students, researchers, journalists—deliver what the system wants.

Aidan Toner-Rodgers responded to the same incentives currently nudging students to ask large language models for thesis statements. The only difference was scale. Like Stephen Glass decades before, Toner-Rodgers allegedly followed a familiar script: game the details, simulate insight, and give people what they want to believe. And it worked until someone asked follow-up questions.

So when professors shake their fists at students for letting AI do their thinking, they might want to ask what kind of thinking the system actually rewards. Robots didn’t cause academic integrity to collapse. They just illuminated the cracks that were already there.

Thanks for taking a look at Black Sheep! For further reading from my serialized memoir, SMIRK, that echoes the themes from this piece, please check out the following:

Chapter 5, Part 3: The Horatio Alger myth

Chapter 14, Part 3: "No Shortcuts"

Chapter 6, Part 4: What’s in a scam?

See the full table of contents for SMIRK here. 0

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This publication will examine cultural themes and motives that contribute to lying, cheating, stealing, and related self-inflicted disasters; the impacts of those events; and the people who play starring roles in these dramas. I find these tales both cautionary and fascinating; I hope you will, too.

A “$60 MILLION Swindle”

Eventually, AI will take our jobs, drive our cars, raise our children, imprison us in the Matrix, and slaughter us with an army of Terminators. But before it can achieve its apocalyptic dreams, it has to do something far more mundane: make money. And much like 35-year-olds living in their parents’ basements, some robots are struggling with that hurdle.

Investors in an AI sports startup called GameOn learned this the hard way—after they sank $60 million into the business, and just before its founder, 41-year-old Alexander Beckman, and his wife, 38-year-old Valerie Lau, were charged with fraud.

When news of the arrests broke in January 2025, coverage zeroed in on the usual themes: the couple’s alleged deception, their fall from San Francisco tech society, and the supposed greed that drove them to fund what journalists called a “lavish lifestyle.” (Given that a starter home in the Bay Area is north of $1 million, the couple’s lifestyle was probably closer to “upper middle class.”)

Beckman allegedly provided wildly inflated sales figures and cash balances to investors over a period of years and even impersonated bank employees to back up his numbers. Lau, an attorney who worked as general counsel for a venture capital firm, allegedly helped fabricate audit reports and deliver falsified documents to banks. Maybe she took the “partner in crime” dating app cliché too literally.

Regardless, public reaction was unsympathetic, as evident in this headline in the British tabloid the Daily Mail:

Here’s what nags at me: Even assuming the prosecutors’ allegations are true, was this really a swindle in the classic sense—an elaborate long con, a bait-and-switch routine? That framing seems ill-fitting.

Because here’s the twist: the product, an AI chatbot, was real. And it worked. It increased fan engagement during live games, providing real-time stats, trivia, and updates. Major league teams used it: the Yankees, the Pistons, the Vikings. It wasn’t vaporware. It wasn’t hype. It just couldn’t make money.

That’s the uncomfortable truth. GameOn built something that functioned and had traction, and it still couldn’t survive. Which raises an even sharper question: If the chatbot worked, why did Beckman need to lie?

The Monetization Trap

The answer isn’t buried in mystery. I asked ChatGPT.

“Great question—and one that touches on some of the real-world challenges of monetizing AI/chatbot tech in niche spaces like sports,” it replied. It then listed a set of plausible issues: a narrow B2B market, over-reliance on a few large contracts, limited upsell potential, dependence on third-party platforms like Facebook Messenger, and difficulty proving ROI.

ChatGPT's most damning point? Teams don’t want to pay much for “fan engagement” tools unless those tools directly generate revenue through ticket sales, merch, or gambling. A chatbot, no matter how clever, doesn’t hit the bottom line. And fans aren’t lining up to pay for it either.

In other words: The bot worked, but the business model didn’t.

Not Built to Last

The tabloid narrative presumes that Beckman set out to defraud investors from the jump. That’s rarely how this goes. Think Elizabeth Holmes. Sam Bankman-Fried. Even Bernie Madoff. Most of them didn’t start out intending to steal—they got trapped in bad math and bad faith and kept doubling down.

Beckman and his wife, Lau, allegedly followed the same road to ruin. On paper and likely in person, Beckman looked the part of a founder at the intersection of media, entertainment, and technology. He had studied film at the University of California-Berkeley and obtained a Master’s in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. His resume encompassed experience in film production, at an interactive video platform, early-stage investing, and working with big brands like Toyota, Mercedes Benz, McDonald’s, Adidas, ESPN, Fox, and MTV. (Beckman’s LinkedIn profile has been removed, but you can view his experience on TheOrg.com and Entrepreneur.com.)

Perhaps important to venture capitalists, he was also a white dude with a strong jawline (see below).

To develop his own startups, Beckman teamed up with Kalin Stanojev, a product designer/software engineer he’d worked with at the interactive video platform Coincident.tv. The pair first co-founded EVNTLIVE, a virtual venue for live music streaming, which they sold to Yahoo in 2013 for an undisclosed sum. Yahoo shut the platform down and absorbed the talent and tech into its video and media initiatives.

The following year, the two founded GameOn. Like with EVNTLIVE, Beckman served as CEO while Stanojev was chief product officer, overseeing design and engineering. (As of yet, Stanojev has not been charged or publicly accused of any wrongdoing at GameOn.) Around 2016, Lau began doing legal work for GameOn and eventually started dating Beckman. Allegedly, she also began helping cover up his crimes.

The House of Cards

The cracks showed early. According to the indictment, GameOn offered its chatbot as a free pilot, didn’t secure binding contracts, and often charged less than $3,000 a month for usage. In some cases, GameOn actually paid its customers for revenue-sharing agreements that rarely produced any returns. The startup’s revenues never exceeded $1 million in any year, and in most years fell well below $500,000.

The obvious conclusion: teams liked the chatbot, but not enough to pay for it. Beckman, facing pressure to show traction, allegedly began inventing it. He created fake income statements, audits, and bank verifications. When investors asked for third-party validation, he allegedly impersonated CFOs and bank employees via spoofed emails.

Money poured in—$80 million total, $60 million between 2018 and 2024—but GameOn constantly struggled to meet payroll and pay bills. According to prosecutors, Beckman and Lau propped up accounts with personal funds, paid themselves back when new funds arrived, and used credit cards to float operations.

And then the lies got weirder. At one point, Beckman reportedly told investors the company couldn’t access funds due to an “armed robbery” at a bank branch in Menlo Park. Another time, Lau allegedly sent a doctored bank statement showing $13 million in GameOn’s account. The real balance? $25.93.

Venture capitalists expect startups to lose money initially, but they won’t invest without signs of growth and the likelihood of a return. GameOn’s revenue was abysmal, and it showed little improvement after the first few years. To get the cash the company needed to stay afloat, Beckman allegedly took matters into his own hands. The indictment alleged:

From at least in or about September 2018 through his resignation from GameOn in or about July 2024, Beckman served as the primary point of contact for new and existing GameOn investors and its board of directors, and Beckman controlled and understood the financial information for GameOn that he shared with investors.

According to the indictment, “money sometimes was transferred to GameOn when the company needed money” for expenses and “flowed from GameOn back to these individuals after new funds from GameOn investors arrived.” (Not unlike a Ponzi scheme.) Prosecutors also alleged that GameOn expenses were covered by personal credit cards, and the credit card bills were paid as soon as new investor money arrived.

Partners In Crime

Beckman allegedly shared the true picture of the company’s finances with only one other person: Lau. There are no details in the indictment about how this arrangement began and whether it complicated, or maybe enhanced, their budding romance. Taking a wild stab, I will guess it probably did both. Regardless, based on the description of how they worked together to create, spread, and maintain lies, the term “conspiracy” seems especially apt.

Beginning in at least 2021, Lau allegedly engaged in a range of illicit duties on her love interset’s behalf, including temporarily sending $86,250 from her bank account to the company to artificially prop up its cash balance; sending fake financial information to investors and at least one bank; and helping Beckman generate fabricated audit statements using real audit reports of startups she had pulled from her employer’s (a VC firm’s) files.

One of these audit reports, for the year ending in December 2022, stated that gross sales for the year were “approximately $68.6 million,” when both Beckman and Lau “knew that GameOn’s gross sales or revenue for the period was less than $1,000,000,” according to the indictment.

Perhaps hoping that San Francisco’s real estate market appreciation would save them, Beckman and Lau allegedly took $4.2 million from the company and bought multiple homes in the city. Then, according to the indictment, they immediately sought to take out a loan against the properties to pay back the company. Beckman allegedly told a bank employee: “We are going to need to move 4.25 from our GameOn account in our private account and then start the work on the most aggressive io [interest only] loan we can have from you!!”

The couple also allegedly took an unspecified amount of additional funds from the company “for their own personal benefit,” including to pay for private school for Beckman’s children, to pay for “luxury vehicles, personal property taxes,” and “private club memberships,” and for expenses associated with their 2023 wedding.

Scheme Unravels

There is only so much lying you can do before the story starts to wear thin, especially when the people you’re lying to want to know what you’re doing with their money. Starting in 2024, GameOn investors and board members allegedly got increasingly skeptical of Beckman as the company continually had weird hiccups in payroll and other cash-flow problems.

Under pressure to show GameOn had healthy cash reserves, Beckman began using fake email addresses to impersonate bank employees and other third parties to reassure staff and investors. He allegedly offered increasingly absurd justifications for why funds couldn’t be accessed on demand, ranging from early withdrawal penalties to investigations into rogue bank staff to, at one point, a fictional armed robbery in Menlo Park.

Unsurprisingly, the investors’ concerns only increased. Allegedly, Beckman recruited Lau to help bolster his lies. In June 2024, GameOn’s board demanded real-time proof of the company’s bank balance. According to the indictment, Lau supplied that proof by planting a fake bank statement.

By July 2024, the problems with the company were making their way into the press. Technology news site VentureBeat published an account of Beckman resigning “under pressure,” staff being laid off, and $11 million going “missing” from a bank account. The news quickly spread through the VC community.

Lau’s employer at the time, a venture capital firm, confronted her in August about her involvement with GameOn. According to the indictment, she first denied she had done anything for the company, and then attempted to delete hundreds of files after being asked to turn over a work laptop. Those files included fake invoices, bank statements, and internal communications tied to the alleged fraud. She wasn’t successful and ended up charged with obstruction of justice in addition to other crimes.

It was only a matter of time before all of the alleged deceptions and details of the scheme made their way to the US attorney’s office. Beckman, once the face of an exciting tech venture, became yet another poster boy for fraud.

Greatness “Around The Corner”

Hindsight being 20/20, it’s fascinating to look back at how Beckman discussed GameOn in the years before the alleged scheme collapsed. A media brand called FUTRSPRT, which allegedly also backed GameOn, published an interview with Beckman in 2019 describing his ambitions for the company.

He told the interviewer:

We wanted to make sure the fan is in control to get the highlights they want and be able to chat with their buddies in real time. GameOn started as a sports company but we thought chatbots were fun.

We realized we wanted to provide [a] personalized content experience by taking real-time data, associating it with media, and gamifying it.

Asked what the “utopian scenario” would be for GameOn, Beckman replied:

Continue to feel like we’re right around the corner of something great but not being complacent. Invest in ways that will make this the preferred way to watch sports.

So much for utopia.

Welcome to Black Sheep, a spin-off publication of my serialized memoir. SMIRK. While SMIRK was a deep dive into my unusual personal and professional relationship with one unique white-collar fraudster— Martin Shkreli — Black Sheep takes a broader view and tells the stories of a wider range of business crimes and failures.

This publication will examine cultural themes and motives that contribute to lying, cheating, stealing, and related self-inflicted disasters; the impacts of those events; and the people who play starring roles in these dramas. I find these tales both cautionary and fascinating; I hope you will, too.

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Like the plots of Armando Giovanni’s Veep and The Thick of It, corruption scandals involving New York Mayor Eric Adam’s administration have spiraled into absurdity. Within the past year, more than a dozen city officials and high-ranking employees have either resigned or been fired, had their homes raided by the FBI, or both. City leadership became stretched so thin and so tarnished by alleged impropriety that Adams had to put the chief of the sanitation department, Jessica Tisch, in charge of the NYPD.

At the center of this cloud of ill-repute is Adams, himself. He’s currently under federal indictment over claims that he took over $100,000 in illicit freebies, including first-class airline tickets, stays at opulent hotels, expensive meals, and straw political donations, from Turkish officials and businessmen. Adams allegedly returned the favor by pressuring NYC’s fire department into allowing a newly built Turkish government-ow…

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Stock peddlers had to get offices, secretaries, regulatory licenses, and business cards to convince people to sink their life savings into questionable companies. Hence, why Belfort built Long Island-based brokerage Stratton Oakmont.

In the age of social media, the barriers to entry are much lower. All it takes is the persona of a sitcom character, a swaggering attitude, financial podcasters as friends, and photos of yourself with a Ferrari, and you can lead thousands of fools into shady stocks like the Pied Piper commanding a multitude of ra…

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This publication will examine cultural themes and motives that contribute to lying, cheating, stealing, and related self-inflicted disasters; the impacts of those events; and the characters who play starring roles in these dramas. I find these tales both cautionary and fascinating; I hope you will, too.

Remember Zulily?

Possibly not. The briefly inescapable e-commerce site, advertising “flash” deals in pop-up ads, blossomed in the 2010s into a $2.6 billion business. Then, just like one of its ephemeral sales, it started to fade. By the end of 2023, the site was defunct.

During its death throes, workers endured round after round of layoffs, “Game of Thrones”-style political maneuvering between managers, and a sense of tragic futility. Benefits were slashed. Demands and workloads constantly shifted. Souls were crushed.

“A slow, laborious swan dive,” one employee wrote in a Glassdoor review. Another wrote: “The ship is going down hard.” A third wrote: “Dusty1 mean girls. Chaotic environment. You wake up some mornings and you get an email from biz-dev: WE JUST LET 25 PEOPLE GO. (ping from teams); 'TEAM HUDDLE AT 10, RSVP?” I could go on, but you get the idea.

Morale sank so low workers contemplated rebelling by turning to crime. We know that’s true because one of them — then-28-year-old software engineer Ermenildo “Ernie” Valdez Castro — actually did it and got caught. Castro, who worked on Zulily’s check-out processes, secretly inserted lines of code that allowed him to skim off portions of transactions and siphon them into a personal account.

Appropriately enough, he called his scheme the “OfficeSpace project.”

“Office Space,” Mike Judge’s cult comedy about disgruntled software workers, was just one of several iconic films released in 1999 that dealt with the theme of challenging the corporate status quo. Others included “The Matrix,” “Fight Club,” and “American Beauty.” I turned 17 that year, old enough to see R-rated movies in the theaters, and I watched them all. All four remain among my top favorites.

Although they were written by Gex Xers and Boomers, the movies of the era spoke powerfully to Millennials — who, like myself, were in their formative teen years or late childhood. In the mid-to-late 1990s, economic stability spawned a vapid, cubicle-filled hellscape where many of our parents spent their working lives. Prosperity made us feel trapped and miserable instead of safe and hopeful. We idealized fictional heroes’ escape from materialism and corporate excess, which they often accomplished through crime.

In “American Beauty,” Lester Burnham quits a dull job and blackmails his boss “for $60,000,” he proudly announces to his disapproving wife over dinner. Before he meets Morpheus and takes the red pill, Neo is already a criminal – a hacker – and levels up his game by bestowing virtual superpowers on himself. In “Fight Club,” Tyler Durden recruits an army of frustrated men to commit anarchist mayhem including blowing up credit card company headquarters.

Only “Office Space” emphasizes the illegality of its characters’ actions – stealing from their employer using a computer virus to siphon off tiny percentages of transactions. Protagonist Peter Gibbons plants a seed that would sprout into justification for embezzlement in many young minds. Explaining his plan, he tells his girlfriend, Joanna: “It’s not wrong. Inotech is wrong. Inotech is an evil corporation.”

In another memorable exchange, the characters fret over whether they might go to a “white collar resort” or “federal pound me in the a** prison” when their crime is discovered. But they don’t end up in either. Their tracks are covered by a colleague, Milton the Stapler Guy, coming mentally unhinged and burning down the office building

Although they were either not yet born or too young to remember “Office Space,” “The Matrix,” “Fight Club” when they came out, Gen Z has embraced those films and their anti-corporate messaging. Viral sharing of scenes and quotes on social media by way of memes and GIFs probably helped. (“American Beauty,” winner of the 2000 Oscar for “Best Picture,” did not enjoy the same revival — possibly because of the sex pest controversy surrounding star Kevin Spacey…and the fact that the storyline includes his character being a sex pest.)

The themes landed even deeper. More socially conscious than Millennials, Gen Zers are also more OK with stealing from “evil corporations.” A fraud prevention company published survey data showing that 42% of Gen Zers (almost half!!) have lied to a credit card firm about their purchases to get charges wiped off their accounts. Meanwhile, 22% of Millennials have done the same. For Gen X, the number was 10%, and for Baby Boomers it was 5%. 

For the sake of this argument, let’s assume that young people associate credit card companies closely with the term “evil corporation,” or at the very least consider them to be unsympathetic as fraud victims.

Only 5 years old when “Office Space” came out, Castro was probably introduced to the movie later in life, during its social media-fueled revival. Nonetheless, it left a significant impression on him. The former Zulily engineer’s scheme was less stealthy than the “Office Space” plot, but the motives and thought process behind it were roughly identical.

As explained by police in charging documents, Castro had worked at Zulily since 2018 and was part of the site’s “Shopping Experience” team. Starting in the spring of 2022, he “began a series of malicious software edits to Zulily.com’s checkout pages,” the document said. The first applied to a small percentage of orders and diverted shipping costs to his Stripe account, which he named “Zulily” so as not to arouse customers’ suspicions.

However, Zulily discovered the “bug” and fixed it. So Castro got bolder. He tried another script that double-charged a small percentage of customers for shipping fees and routed “full” shipping costs to both the company and his account. Perhaps getting overconfident, he then went for another scheme: Manipulating the prices of hundreds of merchandise orders and then purchasing them for pennies on the dollar, presumably to return them for full price.

The third scheme proved to be his undoing. Along with buying items himself at artificially low prices, he also directed orders to a woman he met on Tinder as a means of impressing her, according to the police documents. He called the practice “peacocking.”

Police showed the judge an email exchange between the pair that included confirmation of a purchase of 35 items, including home decor and workout gear. The subject line was “shopping” with multiple “heart” text symbols.

The orders to his Tinder date weren’t delivered, though. They were flagged by Zulily’s fraud team, which also visited his address and found “several Zulily labeled boxes piled outside of the home’s front door and driveway.” By June 2022, the company had pieced together enough of Castro’s scams to fire him. He was referred to law enforcement and arrested on multiple fraud charges later that year.

Charging documents detailed Castro’s interactions with investigators. At first, he clung to a narrative that he had merely been trying to “test an error by sending a large quantity in one order” and “forgot to cancel the items.” He claimed that he changed the price because he was using his personal credit card for the testing and didn’t want to incur large charges.

As questioning continued, however, the truth emerged — along with Castro’s bitterness toward his former employer. Investigators wrote:

He admitted that he did not ever notify Zulily staff of the orders being delivered. When asked what he did with the items delivered, he stated that once he was fired, he threw many of the items away. When asked why he never returned the items to Zulily, he said that once they fired him, his opinion was, “Fuck ‘em.”

Police had access to Castro’s work laptop, which he had returned to Zulily following his termination. It contained a OneNote document that outlined his shipping fee scheme, which he named the “OfficeSpace project.” It outlined details for covering his tracks, including a control to exclude transactions originating from a Zulily IP address and a comment about needing to “fudge exposure metrics.” Entries also described preparations to live “off-grid” if his plans were discovered.

Why he didn’t bother to wipe his work laptop, or why used it in the first place to chronicle his schemes, we’ll never know. Maybe Castro was proud of what he pulled off and wanted to be found out on some level. In any event, confronted by details of his “OfficeSpace project,” Castro gave up trying to hide his crimes. A detective noted:

In a June 21, 2022, post-Miranda interview with me, Castro confirmed that he named his scheme to steal from Zulily after the movie.

Between all three scams, Castro collected $302,278.52, according to police. Coincidentally, in “Office Space,” the characters also managed to steal about $300,000. And just like in the movie, where the characters presumably lose all their ill-gotten gains in the fire2, Castro also allegedly wound up penniless. He told police he sank all of the proceeds into another Millennial and Gen Z-driven, “F*ck the Man”-style financial scheme: GameStop stock.

After pleading guilty to three counts of fraud in April 2024, Castro is serving a 14-month sentence in Washington’s Cedar Creek Corrections Center, a minimum security prison nestled in a state forest. Luckily for Castro, it’s a lot closer to a “white-collar resort” than a “federal pound me in the a**” prison, at least in “Office Space” terms.

SMIRK, as you know, was a memoir chronicling my relationship with chaotic business villain Martin Shkreli, AKA the “Pharma Bro.” As a side effect of the unusual situation – I was a reporter who broke the story of his arrest on securities fraud charges and then became his confidante – I developed a much deeper understanding of the psychology behind corporate crime than I would have from a purely journalistic perspective.

Greed, the motive often cited by prosecutors and most of the press, is rarely the dominant factor. Rather, many high-profile fraudsters and catalysts of business disasters are driven by outsize ambition, overconfidence, feeling like an “outsider,” and desperation to prove their worth. I sought to capture those facets of Martin, a person popularly labeled a “poster child for greed,” in SMIRK to explain how his missteps came about.

Now that the body of the SMIRK manuscript is complete, Black Sheep will carry on by taking a nuanced look at the other corporate scoundrels in our midst, particularly those who are magnets for controversy within their industries or on a broader scale.

People like crypto Ponzi schemer Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, social media influencers who turn to fraud, and myriad other architects of creative “fake it ‘til you make it” scams and schemes are all types who might appear in Black Sheep.

Why am I calling it Black Sheep? Because black sheep have long symbolized everything these types of characters represent to us. For centuries, recessive genes that prevailed from time to time in flocks of sheep were seen as the mark of the Devil. The term “black sheep” came to be a synonym for “rebel,” “sinner,” and “outcast.” 

Curiously, though, black sheep are not always considered all bad. Occasionally, both animal and human versions of “black sheep” win supporters who admire their irascible and contrarian ways. 

Case in point: While black wool was once unsellable – partly because it wasn’t easy to dye, and partly for superstitious reasons – today it is sought after by high-end fashion labels looking for “natural,” un-chemically altered materials. Similarly, black sheep in the business world may wreak havoc in the present, but they often bear the potential for reinventing their industries and creating positive impacts. 

At the very least, their stories are fascinating and instructive – even if only by showing us what not to do and what can happen when good intentions go awry. As the entrepreneur Malcolm Forbes said: “Failure is a success if we learn from it.” 

I hope you enjoy Black Sheep! And stay tuned for future updates on SMIRK!

Sincerely,
Christie Smythe

P.S. Black sheep currently lives as a “section” on the main website of SMIRK, www.smirk-book.com. You will see it linked at the top of the main page.