“Please, can I have a million pounds?” Documentary filmmaker’s wild attempt to get rich in 90 days | television

II’ve never met a billionaire before. This is not the way I imagined things would go. Don’t get me wrong: His brightly lit Manhattan office is nice, but not unusual. The pipes are very hot. As his assistant leads me into the conference room, I’m pretty sure I can see the discarded paper plates of pizza slices sticking out of the kitchen basket. In other words, it’s like most workplaces in the city.

I’m here to interview Jim McKelvey, someone Forbes will tell you has nearly £1.3bn to his name from co-founding the payment app Square. I was told Jim was coming straight from a flight from Tokyo. He enters the room and shakes my hand politely, but quickly looks agitated. I’m not sure if it’s his lack of sleep or if this is how people who make more money napping than you do annually deal with potentially wasting their time. In other words, I’ll have to gently ease my way in.

“So, I Googled you on my way in, and turns out you’re a billionaire,” I say. He agrees. I continue: “I’ve figured it out, and it looks like £1 million to you is worth £20 to me. So, can I please have £1 million?”

It was over suddenly. Almost everything has been going this way for over a month, ever since I started this project to become a millionaire in 90 days. Today, it seems that money is all that people have room to care about. This makes sense: a large number of people can no longer afford most things that provide stability or meaning. At the same time, if you look at the social media algorithms assigned to anyone, you will find that they are being served a cultural diet of entrepreneurship. In brightly lit rooms, business teachers talk seriously about meditation. Teenagers offer crash courses on how to make it big in the cryptocurrency space. Today’s rock stars seem to be founders, venture capitalists, and money men.

I can’t help but find this frustrating. I didn’t grow up with money and I’m used to the idea of ​​a life where money is fleeting. However, as my savings dwindle, I find myself wondering if it had to be this way. Could there be something to society’s shift toward hustle and graft? Maybe this will be my chance to live that elusive safe life. But I think there has to be some kind of pressure, that’s why I challenged myself to become a millionaire in 90 days.

So I pitched the idea to Channel 4, keen to film my show for a million pounds, even though I hadn’t really thought things through. They seemed skeptical, but before the mood got worse, we made a deal.

I waste my first few days on TikTok, watching the best minds of my generation — Stephen Bartlett, host of The Diary of a CEO podcast, and Luc Bellemare, digital innovator and cryptocurrency investor — discuss things like whether humans actually need sleep or how the Bible tells us not to eat potato chips. The consensus seems to be that I need a job. I came up with one based on my past, doing stunts like setting up London’s first fake restaurant in a garden shed.

As a model, I’ll use the artist Banksy and the Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF, both of which create headline-grabbing moments to sell expensive products and inflate their brand value. MSCHF sold 666 pairs of shoes in collaboration with rapper Lil Nas I’ll be doing the same thing to launch my new company, Drops. The plan is, after 90 days, to make enough noise to sell the company for $1 million. But first, to fund my advertising stunts, I need to invest.

Even before Swoop Funding sees me outside its office on London’s Regent Street, I know they’re not the right people for me. They want to see a business plan, and are concerned about the fact that Drops barely exists. Such ancient world thinking! I need a place that embraces risk.

Thank God for New York. On day 15 of the challenge, I arrived and immediately thought: “This is going to be easy.” From one party to the next, I realize that everyone is a millionaire here. “Do you want to make a million?” I was asked. “Why not a billion?” Yes, Why not??

Ikram Majdon Ismail was introduced to me as the co-founder of one of the largest payment apps in the United States, Venmo. The company he sold in 2012 was valued at $38bn (£28bn) in 2020. A day or two later, I stopped by his office as he explained his latest business venture, Jelly-My-Jelly, an app that seems to completely change every time we meet. He’d forgotten the details of my challenge, but when he heard it now, his eyes lit up – he wanted to join.

Ikram stands up and explains how big this is going to be. He announced himself as my co-founder and announced that our company was already worth $10 million. Within a year, people would be filling Madison Square Garden to hear how these acts came together.

A week later, I showcased my stunts over coffee. “I want to make and sell a luxury piece of luggage that looks like a bomb.” Ikram stares blankly. I continue: “Let’s create the first legal child exploitation factory in over a century!” Ikram quickly clarified that appointing himself as co-founder was not legally binding. In the following days, whenever I tried to contact him, I was unsuccessful. Ikram hasn’t responded to a text message from me for a while. I’m desperate, which means crossing one of my red lines: getting into crypto.

Gunnar Lovelace joins me on Zoom from inside a hyperbaric chamber, an oxygen-boosting device with disputed health benefits used by many Silicon Valley loyalists. He is the founder of a crypto company called UNFK that aims to create, promote, and inflate its value of its own meme currency. He wants viral ideas. I have always avoided cryptocurrencies because of my discomfort with ethics. Ikram even brought up the idea of ​​doing a coin together, but I resisted.

However, I am now running out of options. I agree to four or five widespread stunts with Gunnar. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be filming something about trying to trick bankers into committing crimes. I get people to taste plastic burgers outside McDonald’s to make an obscure point about the chemicals in food packaging for filet mignon, and another tucked back into Amazon as in my latest film for Channel 4. I ended up making $18,000, which was much less than I had hoped for.

I’m now seriously low on time. I’m committed to launching the headline-grabbing Drops idea, where unpaid kids design a £100 football shirt emblazoned with their own religious cigarette brand, Holy Smokes. GQ magazine wrote about the release, while influencers found it puzzling. When the order came out, we were able to sell £10,000 worth of shirts. This is not enough. Dead drops. I’m forced to turn around.

Inspired by the slew of online entrepreneurs who say they make millions by selling courses, I’m writing a three-hour masterclass on generating ideas that can make you rich and having a platform designed to sell them. The trailer for My Class gets 2 million viewers. Just 0.5% of those people should buy a course for £100 and I would be a millionaire. I will become rich!

And within 24 hours after the course launches, I sell one.

There’s only a little over a week left. Things are going from bad to worse. It turns out that Jelly-My-Jelly is no longer a podcast app or a TikTok competitor, but rather a meme currency. The same coin he tried to get me involved with is now the most popular coin on the popular cryptocurrency site Solana, with a market cap of $250 million. One trader bought $8,000 worth and in three hours made $2.4 million.

However, I heard from Ikram and he had an idea: I should auction off 10% of myself for £1 million. This sounds scary, but this could be the deal that will get me a million. Word of the proposal has reached Kavita Gupta, founder of cryptocurrency hedge fund Delta Blockchain. She seems really interested. I left New York and went to meet her in Miami, and in her snow-white apartment, we talked about work. I show all the work I created during the 90 days, but I consider them wins. My ethical fashion brand? wow. My educational class? Genius stroke! This actually works. Kavita wants to talk on terms. You will own 10% of all my profits and assets for the rest of my life. But she wants me to manage all life decisions herself. In the next 12 months, I will create a cryptocurrency called OobahCoin.

For the second time in 90 days, I signed a contract without fully understanding it. Gazing out at the Atlantic Ocean from Kavita’s balcony, I wonder if the tears in my eyes are from the ocean air or exhaustion. You’ve reached the end of the 90 days, but this is really just the beginning. Kavita and I made a deal that would make me a millionaire. Does it matter that this deal might encourage more desperate people to bet on cryptocurrency at my word? Can I ignore any moral red lines and become like the people who seemed so foreign to me 90 days ago? Can I become a money man? Maybe I should go to a Wall Street bank and turn Kavita’s offer into more money…