A 2009 American Chopper clip of Paul Teutul Sr. throwing a chair at his son became a viral meme in 2018, the same week Paul Sr. filed for bankruptcy. Orange County Choppers once made $40 million a year but collapsed when TV exposure dried up, leaving the company valued at $0 and owing $1 million to 50 creditors.
If you're on the internet, you have totally seen this meme. Father and son screaming at each other, throwing chairs. Uh, it's beautiful and useful if you talk trash on the internet like I do. The meme is from a TV show called American Chopper. Patriarch Paul Teutul Sr. throwing a chair at his son, uh, because basically the kid showed up at a quarter to 8 AM instead of 7 AM sharp. While the episode aired back in 2009, the irony is the meme didn't become popular until 2018, nearly a decade later. And despite all these eyeballs coming from the meme, That same week that it got big, Paul Sr., the older man in the meme and the guy who started Orange County Choppers, was filing for personal bankruptcy. Despite bringing in over $40 million a year just a decade or so earlier from the Orange County Chopper business, he basically owed a million bucks to 50 different creditors, and his home was in foreclosure, and he valued the Orange County Chopper business at exactly $0. And Orange County Choppers had been a business totally built around eyeballs that they got from their TV show on the Discovery channel. And suddenly, at precisely the moment that eyeballs brought to them would have helped them sell more merch and get famous again and get paid to do speeches and sell more motorcycles, uh, they had missed it by about a week. And, uh, Paul Sr. was bankrupt. If you're interested in a breakdown of the full story of the rise and fall of Orange County Choppers, you can check out the full video. It's in the link below.
