Christian Osgood interviewed Tai Lopez and noticed red flags: fake books on shelves, evasive answers about business. The SEC sued Lopez for $112 million, alleging he told investors his companies were profitable while losing $11-14 million annually, extracted $16 million for himself, then used new investor money to pay old investors.
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Right before all the drama went down with the $112 million lawsuit from the SEC against Tai Lopez, I had him on the Owner Meeting Podcast. I thought it was a really weird podcast because I could not get this guy to talk about business. In addition, he was adding all these fake books to his bookshelf and telling his staff, hey, just fill it with any book. I'm not going to read them anyway. It's just important that it looks like I read a lot of books. Well, I think this is really consistent with what we're seeing here. He is posing to look like he's a big deal. I thought it was weird he was throwing house parties like he did when he was young. If you're doing so well in business, why do you need to have people pay you to host a massive party at your $100 million house? If you're making all this money, you should be able to afford that, right? So that was my first red flag, is the books are fake, he's trying to fill it to look like he's smarter than he is, he doesn't want to do any work, and there was basically no staff in this house. He was running this skeleton crew in his office. The whole thing felt really weird. Then we tried to talk about business. All he wanted to do was change the topic to the Amish, to, oh, this is what we need to pay the President of the United States. He didn't even know whose podcast he was gonna be on. He's like, hey, are you on my podcast? Am I on your podcast? What are we doing today? No plan, no organization, that looks what happened here. There's 3 major problems why I think he's actually in a lot of trouble. Number 1, he told his investors they were cash flowing in 2020 and 2021. He made statements saying, hey, we are cash flowing. He refused to show them the financials, and their tax filings reveal those companies were losing $11 to $14 million apiece. They were hemorrhaging millions and millions of dollars he said were cash flowing. Number 2, he paid himself $16 million out of this capital raise. So he'd already enriched himself even though the venture was losing a ton of money and started at cash flow negative. We know this for a fact. Third and worst of all, after this all came out and he's already seen multiple years of losses, he knows he's not cash flowing, The companies are out of money. One's declared bankruptcy. He raises more capital and uses that to pay his original investors, making the claim, we've never missed a distribution or payment. This is where it becomes illegal. This is where you enter Ponzi scheme territory. That's the basis of the lawsuit. But when you add it all up, where we go, hey, this is a guy who is willing to lie and we know this for a fact, we see that he's withheld information from investors. We see that he's used this money to enrich himself, which by itself isn't illegal. He has failing businesses, which is bad but also not illegal. But then he's raising additional capital and doing it again and again despite the fact that the business is not working and he knows it. I think this guy is finally cooked. He overreached. He raised too much money too publicly, and then he cheated.
