He possibly made a fortune from poker. He definitely won't date anyone his own age. He's known as the King of Instagram (27.9 million followers). Hugo Rifkind meets the controversial, 38-year-old American Dan Bilzerian – and asks, is this what it takes to be famous these days?
Dan Bilzerian has 27.6 million Instagram followers, which is a number that simply doesn't work for me. What does it mean? Who are they? What do they all want from him? I meet him in the penthouse suite of a hotel that he's booked out in its entirety. He sits opposite me wearing a T-shirt and some very tight, very short orange shorts, with his hairless legs spread and his smartphone placed on the chair between them, like a penis.
We're talking about women. "I would prefer 21 to 25 for sex," he's saying, thoughtfully, although, "on the superlow side, occasionally it will be like, 18, 19". For dating, he likes them to be older, maybe as old as 28, because that way they're more likely to know about the films he likes, such as Scarface. He's 38 now. He's a multimillionaire, officially through poker, and he's come to London with a bunch of women to launch a recreational line of non-recreational cannabis. He might be the most famous person I've ever met, and I've never heard of him. Does any of this make any sense? What is this world? What's actually going on?
Bilzerian also has an amazing beard. Not necessarily in a good way. On Instagram it looks fantastic, full and thick and Hemingwayesque, squaring his jaw. Up close, it's weirdly short in some places and weirdly long in others. It makes me think of my dog, which is a schnauzer and has a similarly impressive beard, but whose face shrinks by about two thirds and gets all snouty when he goes in the bath. Maybe Bilzerian's face does that, too. I don't like to ask.
To understand who this man is, or at least as much as I do, I'd suggest you check out his Instagram feed. It is, like his beard, amazing. There's him and there are a bunch of girls. Invariably they are wearing bikinis, even when that's observably not a good idea. In January, he seems to have taken quite a few girls skiing and snowmobiling in Utah, where you'd think they'd get to wear proper clothes but, nope, bikinis it is. Not him. He's wearing an anorak. He's brought some girls on this trip, too, to tour Europe. He says there are 33 or 34, but in the photo he posts a few days after we speak, from St Mark's Square in Venice, there are only six. I'm desperate to speak to some of them, for journalistic purposes, but later that night, at the party (we'll come to the party), I'm told only one of them "does talking"and she's not up for it. I wonder if Dan speaks to them much. I'm not sure he does.
Hey, Dan, I say to him, up there in the penthouse. You're supposed to be a multimillionaire. Why do you even bother with the Instagram thing? What's in it for you?
"Initially," he says, "it was to get laid with less effort."
This, I will learn, is Bilzerian's answer to quite a lot of questions. "I'm a bit of a sex addict," he says. You think? He lives in Las Vegas now, but his life philosophy was formulated when he was at university, in Florida. "I was in a fraternity," he explains, "and when you have a fraternity party, you have every sorority that's invited, so you have these ratios of girls to guys, which is definitely skewed. So I would watch situations where guys who would normally never get laid would be having sex with superhot girls. Or multiple girls. Or whatever. Because there was a shortage of guys."
I see.
"And the way you hook up with the girls," he continues, "is much better. Because now she's pursuing you, and you're the prize. And she's accomplished what she wanted. As opposed to, you know, when the girl has buyer's remorse, or whatever, or the possibility that she says, oh, I was date-raped, I was too drunk, or you took advantage. None of that shit happens. Right? So I think that's a very important dynamic to establish."
Look. Can you just humour me for a bit? All the questions you obviously want me to be asking at this point, such as, "Have you heard of feminism?" and, "Seriously, what the actual f***?" and so on? Can you just trust that I'll get there? Because that would be helpful. Because we have a lot of ground to cover.
Before Bilzerian was a multimillionaire, allegedly through poker (again, we'll come to that, too) and before he was in college, he was training to be a US navy Seal. And, before he was training to be a navy Seal, he was, albeit briefly, in jail.
Why?
"Because I had a machine gun in my car," he says. "At school."
Right. What?
Dan says it was bullshit. He was about to go on a family trip, and he was just taking a machinegun. "I actually usually just always had a gun in my car," he says. "Big gun guy, ever since I was young. Gun was in the car. It wasn't a big deal." He hadn't even realised he was on school grounds, because the parking lot was really big, but the police came and said, "Do you have a gun in your car?" and he wanted to do the right thing, and said yes. "No good deed goes unpunished," he says now, with a shrug.
Bilzerian is still into guns. "There are guns lying around casually in literally every room in his house," a fellow poker player once told GQ magazine. "Before you walk in, his security guard takes you aside and warns you not to touch them, because they're all chambered and loaded." On his Instagram feed, when he isn't waterskiing, or surrounded by girls, or in one case, quite mystifyingly, feeding chips to a bear, he's occasionally waving one around. After jail, anyway, he trained to be a navy Seal, and trained hard, but left that for university, which he left, too. Somewhere in the middle of this, he started playing poker and partying. Or at least, partying more. Some time after this, at about the age of 25, he had two heart attacks.
"So that was the first and last time I ever took Viagra," he tells me. There are a few long interviews about this on YouTube. He was on a skiing holiday, and he'd been up all night having sex, and then he went snowboarding, and then he bought an IV drip off a paramedic and hooked it up to himself in the airport toilet, and then he flew to Las Vegas and took loads of cocaine, and then he gambled all the next night, and then he took Ecstasy, and then he got slapped by a stripper because she wanted to have sex but he only wanted a blowjob, and then he took the Viagra to have sex with another stripper, and then he took a Valium, and then he ate a Mexican meal, and then he had a funny pain in his shoulder and decided to do some push-ups, and then he called his mum and realised he couldn't breathe very well. And that was the first heart attack. Definitely the Viagra, then. Definitely.
What you realise if you watch a lot of interviews with Dan Bilzerian, and I now have, is that although all of this stuff is as mad as his beard, he talks about it very fluently. Amusingly, even. Plus, he tells a lot of the same stories again and again, and has clearly practised them. His persona is well polished. This could lead you to conclude that it is all pretend and fraudulent and play-acting; only, having spent a little bit of time with him, I'm not sure it is. Except maybe for the money. The money is odd.
View this post on InstagramMy boat bigger than your sugar daddies boat
A post shared by Dan Bilzerian (@danbilzerian) on
Officially, Bilzerian made all his money playing poker. He was good at poker, he tells me, "because I had a gambling problem. Because if you do 10,000 hours of almost anything, you're going to get good at it. And the thing about poker is that it's a skill game. It's not like blackjack." Plenty of professional poker players find the idea that he could have made so much – $50 million, some £40 million, he has claimed – astonishing. His secret, he says, was to play rich, terrible players, rather than the best players in the world. He got to play these games because, "people assumed I had a trust fund, and I perpetuated that, but the thing they didn't know was that my trust fund didn't kick in until I was 35 and I, you know, made tens of millions of dollars before that." As to whether people believe him, he says, "I could give a f***." Meaning, in the American way, that he couldn't.
It could have been quite a trust fund. Bilzerian's father, Paul, was a corporate raider in the Eighties. Nobody really knows how much money he made, either, but the estimates are wild. In Tampa, in Florida, he built the family a mansion often described as a castle. Only, when Dan was ten, his father went to jail for 13 months for fraud, and the Securities and Exchange Commission demanded he hand over $62 million. He claimed he had no money to pay, and to date, they have collected only a tiny fraction. He lives in St Kitts now. To my lasting regret, I don't think of asking Dan whether he has ever played poker with his dad.
"A lot of people talk about wanting to be a kid again," he says. "I don't have that. I f***ing hated being a kid. I hated my childhood." I ask what his parents think of his lifestyle now. "I, um, you know, I think my mom's a little bit oblivious to it?" he says. There wasn't much discipline at home, he says, although these days he gets on with most of his family just fine. Although, he adds, "If you think you're going to change me, like, f*** you. And thankfully, you know, I'm richer than all of them. So now I can do whatever I want and they all kiss my ass because I'm the one paying for the family vacations."
Issues. Until now, anyway, beyond the obligatory fratboy investment in cryptocurrencies, he hasn't shown much interest in making money any other way. Now, though, he is launching Ignite, a commercial cannabis brand, which is why he is here, and talking to me. A few hours after we speak there will be a huge party downstairs in this hotel, which he will be at and so will I, although not together because by then I think he's forgotten all about me. Although we'll come to that.
In Canada and much of the US, where his brand is already established, recreational cannabis is legal. Here it isn't, so for this market Ignite is focusing on CBD products. Cannabis, you see, has two main components, THC and CBD. Only the former makes you high, and is illegal here. The latter, which doesn't, isn't. As to what it does do, opinion is divided. Some say it is a powerful painkiller with zero side-effects. Some say it soothes anxiety, and some say it does literally bugger all. Having vaped the little pen Dan's people gave me for quite a while, like a responsible journalist should, I remain undecided.
"I always thought it was bullshit," says Dan, helpfully. Only then he met a child with cancer, he says, who had replaced opioids with CBD as a painkiller. "And I was, like, wow," he says. "So I started really paying attention to it. Then I started using it. I gave it to my cat when she had surgery."
Your cat, I say, clinging on.
"Yeah," he says. "She had back surgery. It was effective."
Bilzerian also smokes regular cannabis, quite a lot. Sometimes he smokes it before working out, which sounds faintly terrifying to me, although he says it helps him "get a better mind/muscle connection". The odd thing about Ignite is that, although CBD clearly isn't a party drug, the company is branding it very much as if it were. All the adverts have the usual hot, underdressed girls, vaping away. Later, at the party, I'll meet people connected to the company who imply that the more controversial this is, the better. "Remember Wonderbra," says one, sagely.
View this post on InstagramLife’s really about the journey 🍄
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Bilzerian is the face of the brand, obviously, and may even know what he is doing. "I'm pretty good at marketing," he says, in a portion of our conversation which, listening back, wasn't actually much like the rest of it. "I understand my audience. I understand guys. I was in the military, a fraternity. I've been around a lot of guys and I just understand what appeals to guys." Still, in the background lurk a handful of more traditional executives, such as Jim McCormick, who used to work for British American Tobacco. And I do, by the way, mean "in the background" quite literally, because McCormick and another guy are sitting on the other side of the penthouse with Dan's assistant and a British PR listening to every word, which could make all the sex chat feel a little awkward, but fortunately they're professionals and so am I.
But where, I ask, do all the girls come from?
"They're girls I've dated," says Dan. "Or girls that are modelling for the company."
He'll bring more than one girl he's dated on a trip? And this is fair to them? They get along? There's no competition? "Regularly," says Dan. "I'll hang out with four or five girls and I've, you know, hooked up with them all. Sure, there's some competition. But there's not really too many issues. Because I'm always honest. There's no hidden stuff. No selling the dream. No false promises. Nothing like that."
And you're happy like this? The endless circus of sex? It doesn't get, I ask, feeling faintly ridiculous, a bit meaningless? "You know," says Dan, "the thing about sex is that, if you're having sex with different women, it's a different experience each time. I mean, surprisingly different. Some girls are more submissive; some are more aggressive. Their bodies are different. Some girls are more bland; some are more passionate; some girls are more intelligent."
But for ever, I say. You don't think about settling down? Having kids?
"Having kids," says Dan, "really isn't … You know. If I have a kid, I'm not going to be the type of parent that's kind of an afterthought. That's going to be my sole focus. I would spend a ton of time with him and mentor him and …"
Or her, I say. What if it's a her? What if it's a her, and she meets a guy like you? But Dan says that if he was a girl, he'd love to have met a guy like him, because then he'd have got to do stuff like going on yachts. I hope you appreciate that I'm trying here. The trouble is, it's just quite hard to elucidate your disapproval to somebody who simply doesn't seem to grasp the concept that his fun, with other people who seem to be having fun, might be regarded as a social ill. When he goes out, says Dan, people are nice to him. People like him. Men, women, whatever. Nobody he actually meets seems to disapprove at all.
Not even, I say, wondering if this is a word I'll have to explain, feminists?
"There was one girl," he says. "Yeah. One girl. We had an issue. And yeah, that was about it."
So I ask what happened, and he says she put out a cigarette on him, and he cracked and had her thrown out of the club. Or at least, that's what I think he says at the time. Only later, when I listen back to my tape, I realise he actually says, "I cracked her on the head and had her thrown out of the club." Which is a bit different. In 2014, a woman claimed he had kicked her in the face from a stage in a Miami nightclub. He was never charged, and later told Larry King he'd actually been breaking up a fight. Another time, he was sued for breaking a porn actress's foot by throwing her off a roof towards a swimming pool during a photoshoot, although that one genuinely seems to have been a consensual thing that went wrong when she changed her mind mid-air. Still, though. "I cracked her on the head." Hmmm.
The party, anyway, is a bit odd. It starts at 7.30 and I'm alone, so I spend the first hour or two experimenting with drugs that don't do anything and not really having anybody to talk to. You know, like the parties you go to when you're 17. In time, though, it fills up. Aside from media, of which there are plenty, all of the men I speak to are over 30 and seem to work in Britain's fledgling cannabis industry; all of the women are under it, and British, and models. All the former have business cards and all the latter have lip filler. Nobody seems wholly sure what they're doing there. Nobody knows Dan. One guy I chat to shows me a screenshot sent to a friend of his by somebody involved in putting together the invitations, which I'll paraphrase to camouflage his indiscretion, but basically says, "Sorry, don't come – you're off the list, because Dan has decided he only wants girls there."
Honestly, there's so much more I could tell you about Dan Bilzerian. I could tell you about his hairless body, which alarms me, and his ceaseless working out, and his stem cell injections to stay young, and his feud with a rival Instagram influencer in Australia, and his brief plan, in 2016, to run for president. I could tell you about his obsession with goats, which deserved more probing than I could give it, and his adrenaline stunts, and about the time he got caught up in 2017's horrendous mass shooting in Las Vegas and was filmed asking a policeman if he could borrow a gun to shoot back. "Get the f*** away from me right now," retorted the policeman. "I don't know who you are."
Instead, I'll just tell you that he finally made it to his own party, three floors down, at about 11pm. Apparently he was sleeping. He does a quick circuit of the packed dancefloor, flanked by some girls who have come down with him, and then heads into a VIP area into which I'm not allowed. The guy has 27.6 million Instagram followers, after all, so what does he care about The Times? I'm not so bothered either. It's fun out here. I wonder if he's having a good time, too. Somehow, I'm not convinced he is.
After that the smell of cannabis wafts across the room, although not necessarily from him, and I start to feel self-conscious about being a married father of two who is still out partying with people largely a decade younger than me, at least. I'm missing a friend's book launch for this. Just before I leave, I find myself remembering what he said when I asked what he makes of women his own age, and indeed what they make of him. Turns out he doesn't really know any.
Written by: Hugo Rifkind
© The Times of London