We regret to inform you that Dan Bilzerian is at it again. Bilzerian, the influencer who’s like if Donald Trump Jr. decided to bulk instead of cut, launched Ignite Cannabis in 2017 with the intention to cash in on the drug’s legalization. This plan has proven to be a colossally bad one. In 2019, his marijuana business Ignite International Brands burned through about $50 million and now teeters on the brink of bankruptcy.
This, of course, is totally unsurprising. After all, Bilzerian has built his entire celebrity on his ability to squander metric assloads of cash on renting fancy houses that he can fill with women who he pays to pretend to like him. Considering that he’s a 39-year-old who has devoted his entire adult life and trust fund to becoming a charmless Alibaba Express Thad Castle, it makes perfect sense that he’d be as bad at running a business as he is at naming his book.
Even less surprising than Bilzerian’s profligacy is how he managed to run through the money. Rather than investing Ignite’s funds in growing the business, Bilzerian treated the company as his own personal piggy bank, expensing very necessary purchases such as a $40,000 rock climbing wall, a $15,000 ping-pong table, and a $130,340 Bahamas photo. Accordingly, Curtis Heffernan, Ignite’s former president, has filed a whistleblower-retaliation lawsuit, alleging that Bilzerian axed him for refusing to misclassify loans from the Payment Protection Program as “miscellaneous income.”
“He traveled the world with a harem of models that would make Hugh Hefner jealous,” said Heffernan’s lawyer Tamara Freeze, “expecting that the company would cover it all.”
Notably, Ignite didn’t even produce any substantial income on its own, instead financing itself by selling shares on the Canadian stock exchange and borrowing from others. In other words, it was yet another vehicle for Bilzerian to waste other people’s money. Although it’s sad that Bilzerian hurt innocent people with his own selfishness, if you invested your hard-earned money into a Dan Bilzerian-led venture, it’s a wonder you’ve survived this long without wandering into traffic.
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