What's up guys and welcome back to wall street millennial? What comes to mind when you see this here in my garage just bought this uh new lamborghini? Here, it's fun to drive up here in the hollywood hills most likely, your internal scam alarm bells are going off right about now. Tai lopez is an internet personality who has polarized the internet with some people swearing by his paid courses, his mentor box program and other paid services, but most people view him as a scam artist. His 70 million view, video of one of his past marketing campaigns, has a roughly 3 to 2, like to dislike ratio with 65 million people disliking it. The comments range from comical to brutal with people saying things like this is the reason i use adblocker or mocking the way that tai lopez talks in the ad.

But who really is tai lopez? Where did he come from? How do you become who he is today and how did he actually make his money in this video we're going to talk about exactly these questions? Tai lopez was born in 1977, putting him in his mid-40s today, and his profession is as an entrepreneur, investor, motivational speaker and online personality. Not much is known about his early life or about him as a person. Besides what he says in his promotional content, he doesn't have a wikipedia page, because very little information on him is verifiable. However, there is another website similar to wikipedia called wikitiya, which does have a page on tai lopez.

Wikitia is basically a ripoff of wikipedia with hundreds of different groups of editors, each in charge of maintaining articles in their own domain because of this decentralized infrastructure, the content of wikitea is much less trustworthy than wikipedia. However, they do claim to have a decent amount of information on tai lopez. According to wikitia, tai lopez dropped out of college and worked at ge capital. He also owned a hollywood nightclub in his early days and is a certified financial planner early in his life.

He spent time reading aristotle in search of the meaning of happiness and living a good life and traveled to 51 different countries around the world in search of people who could help them find that meaning wikitia also claims that, after traveling, the world tai spent two years Living with amish people milking cows, however, realizing that he only had 47 dollars in his name, he decided that he wanted to learn how to build businesses and invest after looking in public adverts for successful businessmen, he worked for someone called mike for free in return for Mentorship in business and finance you're free to think whatever you want about the truth behind this wikitia page for tai lopez, but most likely it was written by tai himself or someone on behalf of tai, to enhance his image. Everything about the article points to someone making up stories that sound good about a person. For example, under the section on his early life, the article says quote at six years old, he started his first small business was when he was six years old selling cherry tomatoes for his mother. After not being able to sell many of them, he opened a lemonade.

Stand and earned a lot more, despite the painfully obvious grammatical mistakes. The writing style implies a literacy level of about 14 years old, but would ty lopez actually write a fake article about himself on a fake wikipedia site? It wouldn't be the first time that he fabricated favorably written articles about himself on the well-respected entrepreneur.com top social media strategist of 2017 list. You'll find tai lopez listed at number one that, along with many words of praise for the fake guru, the article says that tai is one of the most exciting voices on social media and that there is a huge demand for his new paid program. Social media agency and that no one else can teach you more about social media better or faster sounds pretty good right.

It turns out that this list was not actually made by entrepreneur magazine, but instead by one of their contributors. The author for this particular article, was actually a company called the oracles, which is a company that helps entrepreneurs expand their outreach to quote, strengthen their brand elevate, their credibility, cement their authority and reach new audiences. In other words, the oracle's makes articles for publications like entrepreneur magazine that are deliberately promotional for the entrepreneurs who are presumably paying them. It turns out that many of the public figures that you can recognize are users of their service, including richard branson, shaquille, o'neal, mark cuban and jay leno.

Sure enough. Tai lopez also uses them in the top nine social media strategist article they even use the same picture of tai as the one on their website. Another youtube guru you might recognize grant cardone also makes it onto that entrepreneur magazine article not a bad way to make it onto a top social media. Influencers watch list number two on the list.

Gary vaynerchuk, as well as number nine damon john, are also clients of the oracles. It turns out that a lot of public celebrities, with the best reputations in business are clients of this service. The products that tai lopez tries to sell using his questionably gotten reputation include a 67 steps program. The 67 steps program is another one of those self-help programs that promises to help you build up your own business and achieve financial success.

Just by following ty's prescribed program for the price of 67, the program promises access to tens of hours of content detailing all of tai lopez's knowledge from his business success. The marketing for the sale of the program pulls out all the stops. It starts early by saying that you are a lucky participant who has been selected to be a part of the 67 steps program. It imposes three lofty commitments that one must make to themselves before using the 67 steps program, including that you must deserve it.

You must be consistent and you must always invest in yourself along the way. The promises of one day buying your own, lamborghini or being the envy of all of your friends and family are sprinkled in without going into detail of the actual quality of the content. The 67 steps program has been incredibly successful for thai it has booked nearly a quarter million customers plucking in at about 15 million dollars in sales. For about 50 hours of generic self-help content, some web development and aggressive marketing, tai lopez has built up a small fortune by selling this course another one of his businesses is his social media marketing agency, despite branding that implies.

That is an active agency for social media managers is in fact just another course targeting the general population. This is how he uses that fake article from entrepreneur magazine to generate sales by touting his social media youtube and marketing knowledge, including referencing. His number one placement on entrepreneur, magazine's top social media strategist list from 2017. The course promises the same types of things that the 67 steps program does.

It uses the allure of being able to work from your laptop anywhere in the world, avoiding sitting in traffic or even having to dress up for work and always having a job. It also has its own fair share of grammatical errors, true to tai, lopez's marketing style. It starts off with teaser videos meant to seem like an actual live presentation by tai himself, but quickly funnels viewers into the actual social media marketing agency program order, page where the course costs 700-800, depending on which payment plan you select it's safe to say that tai Makes a lot of money from each one of these courses that he is able to sell with all of his success, selling his self-help courses on how to make money and how to become a social media influencer. He has put that money into an actual business, doing something other than trying to sell content to customers taking advantage of the destruction of businesses by the pandemic.

He started retail ecommerce ventures to buy up dying brand names and to try to reinvent them as new e-commerce. Focused companies every so often an opportunity arises that it's so big. You have to double check just to make sure it's real and if you're an investor, you've probably been doing your research right now trying to predict what the next big thing is before the masses catch on, because one thing history teaches us is that those who catch A new trend early are rewarded handsomely to gain credibility with prospective investors. He hired alex mayer to be ceo, while tai takes the position of executive chairman.

Interestingly, alex mayer also has zero experience in investing or e-commerce, with his main accomplishments being a phd experience as a nasa scientist and co-founding the dating website zeusk his phd is in mechanical engineering, and while this is a respectable credential, his academic research focused around operations management. Having absolutely nothing to do with e-commerce, he also claims in his bio to be a former nasa scientist, but looking at his linkedin, he never actually worked for nasa. He instead worked for the qss group, a small engineering company that was a contractor for nasa. So while he did work at nasa in a sense, he was never an employee there, so as misleading firms to claim that he was a nasa scientist.

Basically, tai lopez has just installed one of his friends as ceo of retail ecommerce ventures and they exaggerated his other accomplishments to make people think he's more legit. The rest of his team is equally unimpressive. They hired someone called anton di martino as a senior investment associate, but he has no investment experience, so they just have some cliche winston churchill quote in his bio. Basically, the whole executive team at retail ecommerce ventures is a complete joke.

They have no experience and no idea what they're doing tai lopez has zero experience in e-commerce or retail and is unqualified to run retail ecommerce ventures. His area of expertise is in talking to a camera selling grand ideas to ordinary people, or maybe this whole retail ecommerce ventures thing does make sense for him to do. What he's doing is that he's promoting his business venture to ordinary people in the same way as he promotes his online courses, trying to get people to give him money, so he can invest in these dying companies and promising the potential for once in a lifetime returns. Even if the venture fails, tai lopez will probably still make enough money through his own fees and possibly through a salary that he pays himself for managing the business.

In essence, it might make perfect sense for ty to be doing this if his only goal is to sell his idea with his path to profit, not necessarily dependent on the success of the venture, then he is definitely the man for the job. Despite what you might say about him, you cannot deny that his marketing skills are second to none. Alright guys that wraps it up for this video, if you like the content, don't forget to smash that like button and subscribe for future content, also check out our second channel wsm research, where we post dd on high growth stocks in the meantime. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see in the next video wall street millennial signing out.