How Tony Hsieh’s Friends And Family Milked Millions In His Drug-Fueled Final Months

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In an exclusive excerpt from Wonder Boy, Zappos’ charismatic founder paid a sycophantic circle of acolytes outrageous salaries—and absurd 10 percent commissions—to deliver him happiness during the last weeks of his life.

to be drug-related. But his self-destructive spiral was evident months earlier in the utopian community he tried to build in Park City, Utah. In this exclusive excerpt fromHsieh began paying millions of dollars to a sycophantic circle of acolytes in a desperate attempt to deliver him happiness during the last weeks of his life.had already come and gone by the time the 46-year-old Zappos CEO had bought a ranch in Park City, Utah.

One solution Andy came up with was to bring in people he could trust to watch after Tony. As it happened, Andy knew that his brother had wanted to work with their longtime friend Tony Lee for a while. Lee had spearheaded Wells Fargo’s loans to Zappos in 2003 when the company was close to bankruptcy. Since then, Lee had worked at a number of smaller banks before settling in Texas to manage the finan­ces of the Bass family, the oil dynasty worth more than $5 billion.

In the weeks following his release from the hospital, Hsieh had become focused on the study of biohacking to increase his personal output. He became convinced that inhaling nitrous oxide was a way to heighten his blood oxygen levels and eliminate the need for sleep. Better known as laughing gas for its use at dental offices, nitrous oxide is commercially available as an everyday kitchen item: the cartridges used in whipped cream machines, known as Whip-Its.

While Hsieh was initially seen at mealtimes and held meetings in vari­ous rooms at the ranch to discuss the stream of projects being pitched to him, he gradually started spending more time in his bedroom, and would hold court while sitting in bed, surrounded by nitrous oxide canisters. “His room looked like a homeless shelter,” his brother Andy said later.

But the philosophy of 10X remained and morphed into something else over the summer when Hsieh began demanding that everything be achieved in multiples of ten: ten times faster, ten times bigger, ten timesIn addition to offering new arrivals double-your-best-salary deals, he vowed that anyone who spent his money would be entitled to a 10 percent commission on the amount they spent. If someone booked out a restaurant and spent $1,000 on the tab, for example, they would earn $100.

In total, through an LLC she controlled, Pham sent invoices for what amounted to more than $20 million. In one case, she “managed” a contractor who was being paid $83,333.33 a month for “assistance and management of various projects”—earning her $8,333 every time he was paid. When Hsieh bought a fleet of buses and asked that Pham arrange for them to be retrofitted at a cost of $3.7 million, she took 10 percent of the fee.

 

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