An Influencer's False Promise to Make His Followers Rich

**Jess** (0:00)
Hey, everyone, it's Jess.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:02)
And Ryan. We have a live event coming up that you do not want to miss.

**Jess** (0:06)
It's in Los Angeles on Tuesday, April 28th at the El Rey Theater.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:10)
We'll have Emmy winner and Oscar nominated actor Riz Ahmed.

**Jess** (0:13)
Who was in the Star Wars movie Rogue One.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:16)
And TV and film producer Franklin Leonard.

**Jess** (0:18)
We'll be talking about the future of Hollywood, and we'll have a few other surprises.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:22)
Tickets are still available. Grab yours now via the link in our show notes. See you April 28th.
Our colleague, Suzanne Kapner, covers the retail industry. And in 2021, a new company wanted to picture a story. The company was called REV, which stood for Retail Ecommerce Ventures.

**Suzanne Kapner** (0:48)
And they had reached out to me, saying, hey, you know, talk to us. We have this great business model.
This company was buying up all these, you know, defunct retailers who had filed for bankruptcy, who were struggling to survive. Radio Shack, Pier 1, the list goes on, Dress Barn, Modell Sporting Goods.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:09)
As you're listing off those names, I can just like see myself walking down a mall in like 1997, and like I can see the logos. It's just like a who's who of 90s mall brands.

**Suzanne Kapner** (1:19)
It was a who's who of dead mall brands, really.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:22)
Their idea was to buy these well-known but failing brands and turn them into digital juggernauts.

**Suzanne Kapner** (1:29)
We're getting them on the cheap. It won't be so hard to turn them around. We're going to close all their brick-and-mortar stores. We're going to turn them into online players. It's going to be so easy to make this successful.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:40)
To learn more, Suzanne hopped on a Zoom call with the company's founders. One of them was an online influencer named Tai Lopez.

**Suzanne Kapner** (1:49)
He was very smooth. He's a good-looking guy. He's well-spoken. He's a consummate salesman, and so he does make a nice presentation.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:01)
But after hearing Lopez's pitch, Suzanne ended up passing on the story.

**Suzanne Kapner** (2:06)
I just really didn't buy into what they were doing. It just sounded a little bit too much like smoke and mirrors, and not enough like a real business plan.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:14)
Like it didn't really pass the sniff test for you as a Wall Street Journal reporter.

**Suzanne Kapner** (2:18)
It did not pass the sniff test, exactly. I'm used to talking to people who have been in this business a long time, who know the ins and outs of retailing, and he is not that. He doesn't have those chops.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:30)
But Lopez's idea did pass the sniff test for some of his online followers. In fact, 660 mostly small investors provided Rev with over $230 million. Lopez told these investors that they were getting in on the ground floor of something really exciting, with a promise of big financial returns. But that success would never come. And a few years later, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit alleging that Tai Lopez was running a massive Ponzi scheme. You know what my takeaway is? What? Is that Suzanne Kapner has a good nose.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Friday, April 17th.
Coming up on the show, an influencer's retail empire that never was.

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**Ryan Knutson** (4:47)
If you've heard of Tai Lopez at all, you probably know him from one particular YouTube video. It's called Here in My Garage.