Took $60 million investment from former employer Goldman Sachs
Donald Trump’s Assistant to the President and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has Mr. Magoo’d his way to a fortune over the years (he even stumbled into Seinfeld royalties before it was a hit).
In the mid-2000s, insanely successful World of Warcraft gold farm Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE) brought on Bannon, a former investment banker with Goldman Sachs, to wrangle venture capital, according to an old Wired piece.
In 2006, “Goldman Sachs, together with a consortium of private funds, made a reported $60 million investment in the company,” while Bannon took a seat on the board. But IGE faced a class action lawsuit from WoW players over the insecure legality of trading virtual items for real money and eventually IGE sold off its market place and rebranded as Affinity, a group of online MMO forums.
Affinity pushed out IGE founder and CEO, child actor Brock Pierce (First Kid, The Mighty Ducks), and installed Bannon as CEO in 2007, where he would stay until taking over “alt-right” (that’s the politically correct term for neo-nazi) blog Breitbart News in 2012. Now he appears menacingly (on account of looking like he’s had pneumonia since before JFK was killed) on magazine covers that deem him the puppet master to an obese, old-ass president who likes to be seen signing things he doesn’t read.
The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire [Wired]
