Guns, women, money (HERE and HERE if you must) – if these tickle your fancy you probably form part of the cult that is the Dan Bilzerian fan club. What a remarkable rags to riches story right, a bearded warrior who ascended the steps to bro club immortality off the back of being a bloody good poker player?

That’s the story Dan will tell those who will listen – and there are plenty of them. Take this interview from 2013 courtesy of Vice:

Bilzerian said he started playing the game seriously in college. “I went broke after sophomore year, gambled away all my money, sold some guns, turned $750 into $10,000, flew to Vegas, turned ten thou into $187,000,” he explained…

From then on it was onwards and upwards, his bank roll often touted as being around the $100 million mark. But is there something you’re not telling us big guy, maybe a few pennies you didn’t quite earn? Vice again:

But there’s at least one other reason Dan Bilzerian has made so much money: He had a ton of it to begin with. And that money wasn’t exactly clean. Public records reveal that Dan Bilzerian has been a party to a byzantine network of corporations, companies, and other business formulations designed to protect the assets of his white-collar criminal father Paul Bilzerian from the government, and that the 34-year-old Instagram star has been a beneficiary of trusts established by his old man in the 90s—at a time when dad owed tens of millions of dollars to the feds.

To be fair he has admitted in past interviews that he inherited a little trust fund money from his old man, but he usually follows that with tales of winning $50 million at poker in a single year. The Bilzerian money trail is so convoluted that it has been likened to an onion, in that is stinks and makes you cry the deeper you dig. Final word here from the same article:

It should be said that the Bilzerian family’s financial trickery is less a testament to some unique evil on their part and more to their taking advantage of the convoluted and often unenforceable rules and regulations governing the financial world. “Even with highly public figures, it’s virtually impossible to figure out where their money is,” said Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer who now works as a private financial investigator. “Wall Street has moved to an unprecedented level of secrecy.”

But the role of Dan Bilzerian in this thicket of deception is important. It turns the myth of Dan Bilzerian, the self-made, independent playboy who lives the way you want to live, into just that: a myth.

[source:vice]