JA few years ago, Charlie Javice was on the right track. In 2019, the tech CEO landed a spot on Forbes List of 30 under 30 for her work on a startup called Frank, which she described as “Amazon for higher education”. What does this catchy but completely empty phrase mean? This means Frank helped students navigate the financial aid process. It was apparently so successful in doing this that JPMorgan Chase acquired the company for $175 million in 2021 and Javice was named managing partner of the bank. The entrepreneur shared news on LinkedInboasting that in just four years, Frank had grown to serve “over 5 million students at over 6,000 colleges”.
It turns out that those numbers were maybe just a tiny bit exaggerated. On Tuesday, Javice, 31, was commissioned by the Ministry of Justice by “falsely and dramatically inflating his company’s customer base” in order to get JPMorgan Chase to buy him. According to the lawsuit, Frank only had about 300,000 customers and fabricated data to show a larger customer base. She enlisted a data scientist to build a few million clients, roughly, and JPMorgan, which has about 240,000 employees and pays its CEO $34.5 million for his expertise, didn’t seem to notice in its diligence. reasonable.
Javice was charged with conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud, each carrying a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. Javice has denied all allegations made against her.
Javice, like eagle-eyed Twitter users were quick to note, is not the first Forbes 30 Under 30 alum to suddenly face decades in prison. In 2021, Sam Bankman-Fried, a self-proclaimed “effective altruist,” was on the list. Following the dramatic collapse of his former crypto exchange FTX, he faces a litany of accusations ranging from foreign government corruption to money laundering to illegal political contributions. His colleague Caroline Ellison, former co-CEO of Alameda Research, makes the list in 2022. In December, Ellison pleaded guilty to seven criminal charges facing a maximum sentence of 110 years in prison – her cooperation means she will likely get a much lenient sentence.
Another embarrassing Forbes alumnus is Martin “Pharma Bro” Shkreli, who was in the finance category of the list in 2012. He was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2018 for securities fraud but got out of jail last year and immediately launched an investment newsletter.
Although Elizabeth Holmes has never made the 30 under 30 list, she did headline the Forbes Under 30 summit, she gets an honorary mention. The same goes for Trevor Milton, the founder of a hydrogen truck company called Nikola, who was on a 2020 Forbes list called 12 under 40, listing the Forbes 400’s youngest billionaires. “Trevor Milton, the 38-year-old college dropout behind zero-emissions truck maker Nikola Motor, joins the ranks of America’s wealthiest millennials after tripling his net worth in less than a month. ‘one year’, piece gushed. You know how he got rich so fast? You guessed it: with just a little dash of crime. Perhaps most notably, Nikola make a demo video showing his non-working truck driving downhill but tilting the camera to make it look like it was moving under its own power on a flat road. Milton was found guilty of fraud and awaits sentencing in June. No doubt if he goes to jail he will come out after a few months and start a podcast on green energy.
“The Forbes 30 Under 30 have collectively raised $5.3 billion in funding,” the tech entrepreneur Chris Bakke tweeted on Tuesday. “The Forbes 30 Under 30 have also been arrested for frauds and scams worth over $18.5 billion. An incredible track record.” The first number is from Forbes and the second is the calculation on the back of an envelope from Bakke, but you get the gist: the line between innovator and fraudster seems to have thinned alarmingly.
The problem here isn’t Forbes, of course; the problem is the vision of success that we have been sold and the fetishism of youth. 30 Under 30s isn’t just a list, it’s a mentality: a push to achieve great things before youth slips away from you. The pressure can cause some ambitious people to take shortcuts. And, in fact, shortcuts are encouraged: after all, millennials grew up being told to “fake it until you make it”, cash in now until you become a withered 30-year-old prune. and irrelevant. If you exaggerate a little, it’s not fraud, it’s a scam! Until, of course, the Justice Department came knocking.