Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: YouTube/@tailopez

The late 2010s were a bright time for the self-help guru and serial entrepreneur Tai Lopez. He was a courtside fixture at Lakers and Knicks games, sitting next to Dolph Lundgren or Floyd Mayweather or MrBeast. It seemed as if he could get anyone to appear on his YouTube channel — recording backstage with Rihanna or goofing around in his kitchen with Arnold Schwarzenegger. He went to see Minions with Elon Musk. Life was fun. One guest on his show around that time recalls attending a party at Lopez’s Beverly Hills mansion that was “every 16-year-old guy’s fantasy” of what an L.A. party should be. “There were about five guys and all the rest were wannabe models wearing not enough clothes to make up a yarmulke,” he said. “They were all told that there’d be rich Hollywood people there.”

Since 2014, Lopez has sold his business course, “67 Steps to Success,” to thousands of followers paying $67 per month for the secrets to get “anything you want out of life.” The 50-hour program is not packed with revolutionary marketing ideas as much as repackaged advice from his own idols, like the life coach Tony Robbins or billionaire Warren Buffett. But Lopez did have his own spin on selling the psychology of business. At a time before influencers figured out exactly how to get ads in front of the right audience, he realized he could spam YouTube to draw in millions of viewers. Today, YouTubers joke that Lopez was the reason that ad blockers were invented.

The idea for the ad that would change his life forever came to him at a sushi restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood in 2015. Out on the patio he saw how men would crane their necks as beautiful women walked past. “But if a badass car was going by at the same time as a girl, the dudes would override looking at the woman and look at the car,” he said on a podcast years later.

“You know what’s more powerful than even sex, beauty?” he asked. “A damn Lambo.”

Lopez had actually just bought a Lamborghini; he and his girlfriend went for Halloween as Batman and Batwoman, so he got a Batmobile to match. He set up in front of his black sports car and turned his phone toward himself.

“Here in my garage,” Lopez said, in the now-famous introduction to his ad. “Just bought this new Lamborghini here, fun to drive up here in the Hollywood Hills.” He pivoted hard. “But you know what I like a lot more than materialistic things? Knowledge.”

The camera panned to a wall-length bookshelf stocked with titles like The 4-Hour Body, Veterinary Guide for Animal Owners, and one just called 1001 Books. Lopez said he was “more proud” of those than any luxury coupe for the way they had changed his thinking. It was the beginning of grindset culture for men online — the age of Adam Neumann and the side hustle — and Lopez was at its center, setting a template for how to extract revenue from a streaming audience. “It just printed money,” he has said of his ad. In various estimates over the years, he has said that “conservatively” it brought in $75 to $100 million. The next generation was paying attention, too. Logan Paul and MrBeast both cite Lopez as an early influence.

People on YouTube made fun of Lopez for his ad — for keeping his books where he keeps his car, for the way he landed with a thud on the word “knowledge.” Even parody versions of the spot got millions of hits. Other critics pointed out that Lopez openly discusses how to run a sales funnel — a term for drawing a customer into a program and upselling them on more expensive offerings. Some users claimed they were not aware they would be charged each month for the same advice.

One of his most prominent critics was Stephen Findeisen, the influential YouTube journalist known as CoffeeZilla. On his page, he promises to “uncover scams, fraudsters, and fake gurus that are preying on desperate people with deceptive advertising. If you have to ask … it’s probably too good to be true.” He found Lopez’s course to be full of upsells and questionable advice. For example, Lopez, who says he reads a book every day, advises his audience to speed read and “get away from stories. Stories are how authors fill up the pages of a book.” Lopez was never fazed by his haters. He once tweeted out a poll asking his followers: “Do you believe I’m a scam? Haha.” Over 1,700 people said yes.

In front of a fake backdrop of a Lambo in a garage, Findeisen described Lopez as “the guy who had the brilliant idea to pretend he knows something on YouTube, get a bunch of poor, broke, desperate people to pay him a lot of money, and then try to leverage that into an actual legitimate business.” He was referring to Lopez’s latest venture, in which he was buying up bankrupt box stores with lingering brand recognition such as RadioShack and Modell’s Sporting Goods. The plan was to relaunch them as e-commerce businesses to compete with the likes of Amazon. Findeisen had his doubts: “We’ll see how that goes.”

Lopez, 47, took a winding route to fame and fortune. As he tells it, he grew up in Long Beach, California, in the 1980s as a poor kid whose bodybuilder dad was imprisoned for selling cocaine. He always wanted to make money and his odd jobs took him across the country from operating nightclubs in North Carolina to farm work with the Amish to the boring business of life-insurance cold-calling. He was the kind of guy who would walk into an office without a meeting in a thrift-store suit and tell the man in charge that he would work for free if he was told the “secrets of business.” From there, he worked his way into the financial-services division of General Electric and made money on the side with ideas like lifeinsurancetricks.com and Elite Global Dating, a site for “millionaires to date beautiful women.”

During his rise in the early years of the manosphere, Lopez met a fellow entrepreneur named Alex Mehr, a mechanical engineer born in Iran who worked for NASA and co-founded the dating site Zoosk before selling it for $258 million. The two bonded over their shared admiration for Warren Buffett and wanted to try their hand at Berkshire Hathaway’s famed acquisition strategy. In November 2019, they founded Retail Ecommerce Ventures LLC, with Lopez serving as CEO.

When the pandemic leveled the retail market months later, there was an opportunity to scoop up distressed or bankrupt assets. Dress Barn, Linens ’N Things, Modell’s Sporting Goods, Pier 1, RadioShack, and Stein Mart were soon under REV’s umbrella. It was a challenging business model from the start. “A lot of the manufacturers don’t need another third-party online retailer,” says Mitchell Modell, the former CEO of the defunct chain that bore his family’s name. “It’s a tough marketplace.”

But REV investors who poured in tens of millions of dollars were enticed by the near-impossible promise of up to 25 percent annualized returns. One investor was told that Lopez said he was able to offer such returns because their e-commerce employees were abroad and because they bought “the businesses so cheaply,” according to court records. (Modell’s, for example, was acquired for $3.6 million.) Lopez emailed investors explaining how properties like Dress Barn and Stein Mart were “on fire” and that cash flow was strong. Investors say they were impressed by the returns, the semiannual trips to Las Vegas and Puerto Rico, and the weekly meetings in which Mehr and Lopez informed them of the latest goings-on.

The self-help guru even had a readymade pool of investors from his 67 Steps program. Jerome Maldonado, a contractor and realtor based in New Mexico paid Lopez for “mentorship” before joining REV as an investor. “These guys were awesome about keeping everybody up to date on stuff,” he says. “There was nothing that wasn’t transparent or disclosed.”

Lopez wasn’t afraid to be bold with REV’s properties. In July 2022, the company relaunched RadioShack as a cryptocurrency exchange with an edgy tone on Twitter. A sample tweet: “Every account on the bird app is subject to catching this mf smoke. With the exception of @Hooters because i like big tittes. Its that simple.” Lopez was still posting constantly and kept up with his self-help programs, discussing how he had achieved more output by dividing his day into 15-minute increments. REV kept expanding as well. That September, the company spent $35 million for Tuesday Morning, a discount home-goods chain bankrupted by the pandemic. “That was a very ambitious reach,” says Maldonado. “Unfortunately it ended up not going in the direction they wanted.”

For the first two years, investors were receiving their monthly dividends without a problem. But Maldonado says that the Tuesday Morning acquisition put REV into shaky territory. One early investor, a drop-shipper named Jared Goetz, said on CoffeeZilla’s channel that he was supposed to receive back his roughly $275,000 initial investment that September with a lump sum of 40 percent on top. He heard from COO Maya Burkenroad, Lopez’s cousin, that there may be a delay. “Maya reached out and was like, ‘Hey is it cool if we postpone your payment for like two weeks we’re just getting things in order,’” he said. Goetz was okay with it. “The deal was great,” he said.

Delays accrued. About a month later, Burkenroad sent a screenshot of a wire transfer, but Goetz claimed it never went through. Then she did not respond for a month. On December 1, she finally got back to him, blaming the delay on travel — and being six months pregnant. “How can you treat people like this?” Goetz asked on WhatsApp. “I apologize, Jared,” she wrote back weeks later. “My dad died so I’ve been a bit out of it.”

During this same period, Lopez also went dark. He is the kind of person who is posting all day every day on multiple social-media fronts, so fans noticed when he disappeared even for a few weeks in the late fall of 2022. In an appearance on the business-focused podcast The Iced Coffee Hour on December 12, 2022, he calmly addressed his absence. Wearing a pink polo and a black Carhartt beanie, he said that he had read the second chapter of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents some “300 times” and suggested that REV’s business was doing well. As for his recent timeout on social media, he said that with a “personal brand, sometimes you need a sabbatical.”

Inside the company, internal documents showed that their brands were facing monthly net losses of up to $12 million. By November, REV executives were growing desperate. After taking top investors to Las Vegas, Mehr wrote a gambling-focused email soliciting more funds. “We’re going all in on REV and we want you to join us at the table,” he wrote. “If you don’t want to look like a joker, then the time to get in on REV is now.” On December 15, Lopez got on his first investor call in several weeks, revealing to the team that REV could not make investor payments and were looking to sell off their portfolio.

Authorities now claim that Lopez, Mehr, and Burkenroad had more to be cagey about than just the losses. Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Lopez and Mehr with several fraud counts for “misappropriating investor money and operating a Ponzi scheme” from 2020 to 2022 with $122 million of investors’ funds. In meetings, they say Lopez and Mehr discussed the “triage” of payments — using new investors’ money to pay back those who had already put into the pot. The books were allegedly a mess, with the company co-mingling funds from each of its brands to make them look as if they all were performing well. Lopez had allegedly lied to investors for years. Though he told his team in February 2022 that Dress Barn was performing well, the company actually lost $13.7 million the year before.

As for Burkenroad, the SEC claims that her résumé on REV’s website boasting of ten-plus years of “managing multimillion-dollar companies” was bogus. Prior to REV, she worked as a substitute preschool teacher. (The REV executives did not respond for comment.) Facing bankruptcy in 2023, Lopez and Mehr were forced out. They are now facing civil penalties, permanent bans from selling securities, and disgorgement from the money they made at REV. This could be a major hit for Lopez’s other business: Feds accuse him of siphoning $12.5 million from REV into his personal company.

Not everyone involved is upset with Lopez for the REV debacle. Maldonado, who says he lost $1 million, still thinks highly of Lopez and Mehr. “I actually still do business with them because they’re not bad dudes,” he says. “They freaking hurt themselves more than anybody.” But in the YouTube finance community, many are celebrating Lopez’s failure after years of promoting himself as a business phenom. CoffeeZilla’s video on the indictment was titled “its always the guy you suspect the most.” Meanwhile, Lopez is still running ads for his courses on social media and posts nearly every day. The morning before he was charged, he wrote on X: “Unless you are dead, all defeat is psychological.”

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