King Of Instagram 'Dan Bilzerian' Truth You Should Know!!!!
Who is Dan Bilzerian? Why is his net worth constantly being Googled? And why does he always seem to be surrounded by insanely hot, and mostly topless women, like Lindsey Pelas?
The man’s meteoric rise into the internet A-list started with just one five-second clip, lifted from the live TV coverage of the 2013 World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. It shows a player sitting at a felt table, betting on a hand, with $7 million in the pot. Or at least that’s what you think it shows the first time you watch it. But then the clip repeats, and repeats… until, finally, you notice the intensely staring, Tom Cruise-ish figure in the top-left corner of the screen. He’s sitting in the spectators’ gallery, bathed in blue mood-lighting, watching the game. More to the point, there’s a young woman draped over him – black dress, long hair, adoring eyes – who appears to be employed for the sole task of, well…stroking his beard.
Thus the internet – and the world – was introduced to the strange and unsettling phenomenon of Dan “Blitz” Bilzerian , the 35-year-old son of an exiled Eighties corporate raider, and a kind of Bruce Wayne-meets-Hugh Hefner for the social-media age.
Before the beard-stroking video went viral, few had heard of Bilzerian outside the sweaty male sub-culture of high-stakes poker or the core group of fans who kept track of him online.
One year later, however, and Bilzerian – a 5 ft 9 and a half inches tall, barrel-chested former US Navy Seal trainee and self-described “venture capitalist” who splits his time between Los Angeles and Vegas – is one of the biggest stars on the internet, and a man through whom millions now vicariously live out their fantasies in real time.
Crowned the King Of Instagram by his folower (he has over 16 million of them, and adds another 20,000 or so a day) his feed documents a lifestyle so outrageous and seemingly free of moral, financial or legal constraints, it’s as though he inhabits a Jason Statham movie, or a Hunter S Thompson novel – only with faster cars, less inhibited females, and more advanced weaponry.
He gets his hair cut by bare-breasted women in bow ties. He buys a new pick-up truck so he can carry around his 20mm anti-tank gun. He makes eight-digit bets on poker games. And he takes mobile phone portraits of himself next to his customised Gulfstream IV jet, which has his personal trademark – a headshot of his pet goat, Zeus – painted on the tail. He is the ultimate antidote, in other words, to adorably posed selfies of Justin Bieber and other sappy, endorsement-soliciting celebrities.
Indeed, when Bilzerian isn’t naked in his photos – he has skinny, hairy legs, a bone-deep tan, and a laser-treated chest that resembles a ribbed condom filled with rocks – he is typically dressed in a pseudo-military get-up of dark T-shirt, boots and cargo pants. His captions, meanwhile, are pithy enough to command a million-strong Twitter fanbase of their own. “Parking has proven to be less of an issue than previously anticipated,” he wrote recently, linking to an image of his six-wheeled,$625,000 Brabus g63 AMG , its rear tyres mounted on the stairway of what appeared to be someone’s LA home.
A Wall Street Journal investigation has revealed that his father, Paul Bilzerian – who now resides on St Kitts in the West Indies – is a convicted fraudster who has paid only $3.7m (£2.3m) of a two-decade old $62m (£39m) judgement against him. Naturally, questions have been raised over how much, if any, of Bilzerian’s money comes from his father. (Bilzerian declined through his representatives to talk to GQ.)
The details of Dan Bilzerian’s early life read more like a Marvel Comics origins story than the biography of a real human being.
He grew up in Tampa, Florida, in an eleven-bedroom mansion that was half the size of Buckingham Palace, with its own indoor basketball court, batting cage, lake-front views, swimming pool, water slide, and an “imported volcanic rock mountain”. His dad, descended from survivors of the Armenian diaspora, owned a robotics company, among other investments. Meanwhile, pretty much everyone in his family, including Dan, his mum, Terri, and his little brother, Adam, has a near-genius-level IQ.
Bilzerian, however, had a lonely and often stressful childhood.
His dad, an elaborately mustachioed and sideburned former juvenile delinquent who’d fought in Vietnam and been a disruptive presence at Harvard Business School, was absent much of the time, working on exotic deals. And when the old man was around, his stubborn, take-no-prisoners attitude tended to make life difficult – such as when he sued his son’s Little League baseball team for slander in an argument over a $5,000 donation, only for the case later to be dismissed. “Basically I didn’t get a ton of attention as a kid,” Bilzerian has admitted, “I guess that’s why I’m such a flashy lunatic.”
When interviewed Dan Bilzerian in July 2014 by the radio host Howard Stern, Bilzerian declared that his net worth was around $100m (£63m) – $50m (£31m) of it from the previous year’s winnings – and said he has 20 employees, including three assistants and three chefs. (Bilzerian, it should be noted, doesn’t pretend to be among the world’s best poker players. He simply argues that he has access to, and is good at picking, the most lucrative private cash games.)
Few are convinced of the accuracy of those numbers, however. “Does he have $100m?” asks Jonathan Grotenstein, the poker player who visited his home in LA recently. “No, I don’t think he has access to that kind of money. He plays poker at really, really high stakes, but he’s not playing in the top games with guys like Tom Dwan, or going to Macau, where million-dollar pots are won and lost all the time. I think Dan is more about using poker as part of an image that he’s trying to create, and I think there are a lot of people out there who will lend him a private jet, or let him test drive a ridiculous car.”
What is undeniable, however, is that Bilzerian has displayed a lot of savvy in developing an entirely new kind of celebrity – and has carried it off with a nihilistic, gonzo-esque sense of humour that has for the most part diffused its more abusive undertones.
Often, in fact, he seems to be sending-up his own image while at the same time revelling in it. “While this new watch may not get me any pussy,” as he tweeted a few months ago, along with a picture of his $800,000 Richard Mille timepiece, “it does make me feel better about being neglected as a child”. Later, he faked his own arrest and disappeared for a few hours… only to re-emerge with a video of himself doing donuts in a police car, sirens blaring, with what looked like a whiskey bottle in his hand.
Bilzerian’s talent for calculated risk is also beyond question.
When he invested $1m in the Mark Wahlberg war film Lone Survivor, for example, it was conditional upon him getting at least eight minutes of screen time and 80 words of dialogue. When his role was cut to almost nothing, he sued, revealing a contract that read more like a hedge-fund position than a Hollywood deal.
And yet in the end, having reaped all the publicity, he dropped his case, arguing that the film had been so successful, he didn’twant his money back – because he’d made $1.5m on the back end. Similarly astute was his decision to put up 20 per cent of the $10,000 buy-in for an up-and-coming poker star, Jay Farber, at the 2013 World Series of Poker. When Farber won $5m, Bilzerian was able to claim a $1m cut. What’s more: he got to sit in the front row, getting his beard stroked by a model on live television.
Bilzerian has already hinted at the answer in a self-leaked text message exchange with his social media manager, Greg Baroth, who complained that some of his client’s more lurid behaviour wasn’t a brand-friendly idea and could turn-off future sponsors. “Oh well,” wrote Bilzerian, before posting an image of himself on a yellow life raft, being carried through a crowded nightclub with a naked woman in Christian Louboutins lying face-down next to him. “Good thing I’m rich and I don’t give a f***.”
from Poker
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