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.
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.
