Dan Bilzerian - The Setup

THE
SETUP

Chapter 2

Time Is Money

W hen we first moved into a modest home in the neighborhood, several years before my fathers conviction, people didnt think my parents had money. The ladies at the country club would pull up in their Mercedes-Benzes sporting designer bags and tilt their noses up at my mother because they thought she couldnt afford those things. I could never understand why she drove a Jeep instead of a Ferrari, and I told her so, but that was my mom.

My mothers name is Terri, a petite fair skinned Norwegian with a permanent smile and a positive attitude. Her standard uniform consisted of tennis outfits she bought on sale at Macys and running shoes. My mother rarely wore makeup and even though my father gave her expensive jewelry she only wore fake gold clip on earrings and simple necklaces. She really didnt give a shit about money or impressing people and I think she got that from her father Harry.

My grandfather, Harry Steffen was a wealthy rancher whod made it through World War II with everything except his hearing. He had permanently squinted eyes and a thick salt and pepper beard that covered his windburnt skin. Having grown up in the great depression, he took pride in doing hard work every day. Even in the dead of summer hed sharpen his lawnmower blades and carry metal cans of diesel fuel to his tractor wearing a scratchy long sleeve wool shirt and polyester pants. I remember watching him perplexed, wondering, what the fuck is the point of having money if youre gonna spend your time sweating your ass off doing bullshit work.

Harry had a ranch in Northern California, and the family would go there for Thanksgiving and Christmas. There were moose heads on the wall and bear skin rugs, but what I was always fascinated with was his guns. Occasionally he would take me around on his four-wheeler to look for things to shoot. I remember him stopping after seeing a big hawk. He pointed up at it, and I looked at the majestic creature circling above us. Instead of saying, Hey, look at that bird, its beautiful, he said enthusiastically, Look at that bird, lets see if you can bust him! I was taught to kill animals, and if you didnt do that, you were a pussy, according to my uncles and cousins.

I felt bad shooting animals, but I thought it was just because I was a pussy. It wasnt until later that I realized its actually the opposite, shooting animals for sport doesnt take courage, its what insecure guys do to feel powerful, but at seven years old, all you know is what youre told.

One day, I saw a big rattlesnake slithering on the side of the road. Excited for the opportunity to kill something dangerous, I walked up behind it, quickly grabbed it by the tail and whipped it onto the pavement until it was dead. I was proud of my kill, because it was evidence that I wasnt a pussy, so I triumphantly draped it over the stop sign and continued on home. Some of the neighborhood kids saw this and immediately told their parents, who told my father.

My brother and I.

You killed a rattlesnake with your bare hands? My father asked.

I nodded, unsure how he was going to react.

Thats impressive, those are deadly! he exclaimed. It was one of the first times I received his approval.

He told that story every time his friends visited, and I would just sit there and smile; he wasnt lying. But what I never had the heart to tell him was that that fucking snake must have been dying of cancer because Id never seen anything move slower in my life. But I rarely got praise, and I certainly wasnt going to mention that small detail.

My dad, Paul, looked more like a PE coach than a businessman. He was an athletic six-foot, one-eighty-five with a bushy mustache and long sideburns. Whether it was a board meeting or a baseball game, my father always proudly wore his sweat-stained Boston Red Socks mesh back hat with his golf shirt neatly tucked into his swim trunks. He grew up in a poor family in Worcester, Massachusetts and enlisted in the military soon after dropping out of high school. After a tour in Vietnam, he aced the SATs and was accepted into Stanford where he would meet my mother.

Dad busted his ass and after four years got into Harvard Business school, which, as a high school dropout, was unheard of. My father was a machine, doing whatever it took to accomplish his objectives. And he was a complete maniac in the process. His work ethic was inexorable, but so was his temper. This most notably manifested itself in anything competitive like work or sports.

Growing up, I had very little interaction with my father because he would usually work around sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. The one exception was when he insisted on being my Little League coach. It sounded great, but sports with my father wasnt fun. It wasnt Go out there and try your best; it was There are no points for second place. And if we lost, he would go crazy, which included everything from screaming at me and the other kids to throwing equipment at us in the dugout. He wouldnt speak for the entire ride home, and I could practically see the steam coming out of his ears.

Eventually, this doomed experiment in parenting resulted in my dad suing the Little League for slander.

Bilzerian Strikes Out

Paul A. Bilzerian, the multimillionaire corporate raider and convicted felon, struck out again with his slander suit against a St. Petersburg Little League official. On Wednesday, a three-judge district appeals court panel in Tampa sided with a lower court order dismissing Bilzerians suit against Rick Brannelly, vice president of the Northeast Little League.

Bilzerian sued Brannelly in May 1988 after the Little League official told the St. Petersburg Times that Bilzerian reneged on a pledge to give the league $5,000 if the 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old players raised an equal amount in a fund-raising drive. The league, selling household goods door-to-door, fell short by $52.25.

Bilzerians suit was dismissed last August by Pinellas County Circuit Court Judge Fred L. Bryson Jr. after Bilzerian failed to prove he suffered damages from Brannellys statements. Bilzerian, in fact, had a great year in 1988, buying Singer Co. for more than $1 billion and selling off most of its assets at a personal profit estimated at between $50 million and $100 million.

Meanwhile, Glenn Burton, the Little Leagues attorney, said the League never got the $5,000and both sides spent at least twice as much litigating this nonsense.

* James Greiff, Bilzerian strikes out, Tampa Bay Times, October 17, 2005, https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1990/07/21/bilzerian-strikes-out/.

It started when the vice president of the Little League told the newspaper that Dad welched on an agreement. Pops said they lied about the accounting by over a thousand dollars and were trying to extort him, but either way, it was front page news.

By this point my father was worth hundreds of millions, but youd never know looking at the guy. Hed pull up to the country club in a shitty Jeep wearing a Casio watch. It was very strange to me; I didnt understand why he never bought nice things or what he even wanted all the money for.

Nothing about my father was normal and his parenting was no exception. The one thing I distinctly remember learning from my dad, other than to do whatever it takes to win, happened when my mother gave me shit about not making my bed at breakfast.