Wealthy Man Punches Kid In Face & Goes To Jail? Who Is Michael Loeb? | My First Million Podcast

He just punched this kid one time, but he hurt him pretty bad.

Who's the billionaire of the week?

Yeah, let me pull up my notes. So his name is Michael Loeb. Have you heard of him?

I had not.

Okay, so Michael Loeb, uh, in the '90s— I'm pulling up my notes— he started this thing called Synapse Group. And basically what they did was— this was before, uh, a lot of things were popular on the internet, and so they patented— I don't know how they did this, there must have been something unique about it— but they patented the online subscription model.

I don't—

yeah, I don't know like how that— there's some really nitty-gritty things that are a little bit beyond what I'm able to understand.

But hold on, they made money off that patent or they just patented but everybody does it?

Well, so they just created a unique way to do it and I think— I don't know exactly how it worked, but basically to Time magazine, Meredith, which is a huge magazine publisher, all these magazine publishers would pay them money to get them more subscriptions because this way in which they were able to get people to renew subscriptions must have been fantastic and it worked really well. I don't understand how it worked then. Basically what it seems now is like a really robust affiliate network. So like Meredith will cross-sell Meredith, which is a $3 billion company based out of Minnesota, I believe. Bought the company Synapse for a lot of money and they deployed it across all their brands. So it's kind of—

it was hard. He made it big through the Synapse Group, which was a magazine subscription thing.

Yeah, it definitely made him wealthy. He didn't make him a billionaire, but it made him— he definitely got wealthy. What made him really wealthy was with his co-founder of Synapse, he went and started Priceline. And Priceline eventually, I think— are they, are they owned by Expedia or are they their own thing?

Uh, I'm not sure. So I'm owner. Let's just check it out. Booking, Booking.

So it now it's just a huge, you know, huge thing. So that, that made them very wealthy. But what's interesting is after that he started, um, like the, the what used to be part of just like a, a rich entrepreneur's playground where they just launched companies, right? And it's called Lobe and Lobe.nyc. And they've started a whole bunch of companies, including a company called, I believe it's called Script Relief. Do you know what that is?

No.

So what you do is you go to it. They started companies like, or they used to, they used to own Script Relief and then they renamed it to something else. But basically what you do is you go to the website and you can get discounts off of your pharmaceutical drugs. And so like if you want to buy, if you have Xanax or some type of acne medicine or something like that, Somehow they get access to these deals and you use that coupon code at CVS and you get a discount and it's paid for sending CVS business.

They made that business we talked about on the podcast called Thanks, that B2B gifting thing. It looks like it's in their incubator.

Yeah, so they own a bunch of stuff and he owns a lot of them. And a business like Script Relief was making something like $100 million a year in profit. And so some of his companies are really big. Now here's another reason why he's interesting. Do you ever watch that TV show Billions?

Yep, love it.

You know the house that Bobby Axelrod bought?

Okay, yes, that's his house.

That's Michael Loeb's house.

Oh wow, okay.

And last year or two years ago, Michael Loeb had a big party, like a fundraiser, like a sophisticated thing, and his son brought some friends along, and some of the 18-year-old friends got drunk and started pissing on the front lawn and just looking like a fool. And so Loeb punched one of the kids in the nose and broke his nose and might go to jail for it. He, he just punched this kid one time, but he hurt him pretty bad.

He's gonna go to jail for just that?

They're, they're trying to get him to go to jail for that. I mean, that's assault. If you, if you hurt someone, you can definitely— if you weren't a billionaire, you definitely could go to jail for that. I, I, they're trying to get him to go to jail. I have a feeling he's just going to write a fat check. I mean, yeah, the kid was— it's probably just a rich snobby So where did you see this scripts thing?

It's not even on their website.

I talked to people who work there.

Ah, Sam doing his thing. Investigative journalist Sam. I like it.

I just talked to people who work there. So if you Google— and let's see, Michael Loeb, uh, uh, Google Michael Loeb Script Relief. It's, it's on his LinkedIn.

Yeah, I see it now.

Um, it's renamed something else though. Do you— does it say what it's renamed to?

I'm checking, but you know, logging into LinkedIn is like, you know, taking the first 10 steps into hell. So I'm going to try this now.

ScriptRelief was recently sold to UnitedHealthcare.

Over 5 million users.

Yeah, so it was sold to someone else and now it's called something else. But he just has like a web of companies and he's just super interesting because Dude, this is going to sound weird.

When you look at this guy, do you, do you think this guy looks like a billionaire? Does this guy look like a successful guy?

No, that's why he doesn't seem to me. He looks like a guy who would punch a kid in the face.

Yeah, he looks like a guy who's like bitter about his life and punched a kid in the face for that reason, not punch a kid in the face because he's a billionaire and the kid pissed in his pool.

No, he looks like he would be punching kids in the face regardless of what his financial status was. That's why he's interesting to me.

So I have such a—

look at his mugshot. Google his name and look at his mugshot. Like, he looks like— he looks like, uh, he looks like a tough guy.

Yeah, he looks— yeah, he looks like a tough guy. He looks like an enforcer that a billionaire would have. He's a billionaire, but he looks like a billionaire's enforcer.

Yeah, that's why I think this person is interesting, because—

oh dang, they have a picture of the kid who he punched in the face.

Yeah, he fucked him up.

He broke his nose. Oh man, I did not expect to just see those two side by side. That's— yeah, this is quality. This is quality Google image searching.

It's good, right? Look at that kid. He definitely has a punchable face.

Yeah, well, the kid looks like he did something. He's even— he's like kind of smug in the picture. He's got a broken nose, he's in the hospital, his shirt's covered in blood, he's got a little smirk on him.

Yeah, super interesting person, right?

Yeah. So okay, I like this guy. I never even heard of this guy. I feel like you know a bunch of these guys that are like the either media titans or like these other like New York, you know, New York rich people. I only know like San Francisco or like Dubai rich people.

I know them because I spend time on Wikipedia because my way of building businesses is I like to see what has worked and I reverse engineer how it worked and I'm like, all right, I'm going to deploy that on my company. And when I'm reverse engineering things, I'll like read about the company.

Right.

And I'll see who started it and I'm like, oh wait, that guy started it. Oh, but he was friends with this person and they partnered previously. I bet he had access to— that's probably how. So like, I like under— so I just like reverse engineer things.

Yeah, I like that. And then you call people, which most people don't do. You get on the phone and you start calling people who work at the company and you get that extra 10% that you needed, right? To get—

that stuff helps because I've made friends with someone who started his thing. So now if I want to meet him, I have it in, right?