Michael Rubin
speaker
330 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Michael Rubin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, I wasn't getting out. I thought I was done. And so I hired a bankruptcy lawyer. At 16. Yeah. I'm going bankrupt. It's over. I got $200,000 in bills, $80,000 in inventory, half a push. I hired a bankruptcy lawyer. And in our second meeting, he says to me, Michael, how old are you, by the way? Are you like 21, 23? I'm like, no, I'm 16. He's like, what? What? I'm like, I'm 16.
He's like, well, I got good news for you. You're not old enough to be able to legally incur a debt. So this would be a lot easier than you thought.
It doesn't defer to your parents. So they actually got all the creditors together. And, um, it was the first time I actually, so I was able to settle my debts for $38,000, but I didn't have the money. Right. And so, and my parents never gave me a penny. I grew up in like a very middle class family. Like The house we grew up in cost $42,000. Today it'd be like a half a million dollar house.
So, I mean, they were both doctors, but we were, I mean, we were middle, we were, you know, not the way, you know, my kids grow up. They were middle class. So I went to my dad, I said, dad, look, I need to borrow $38,000. He's like, that's your entire college money to go to college. I'll give it to you if you agree to go to college and pay for it. So of course I made the deal.
But then something, I had a big twist in life about two weeks later. There was another ski shop that went out of business and they had a similar amount of inventory About $200,000 in inventory, rather. And it got auctioned off by the government. And I bought it for $13,000. So I went back to my dad. I said, hey, dad, I got great news. Like, not good news. I have great news.
I'm going to be able to pay you back much more quickly. I just need another $13,000. My dad looks at me. He's like... He was literally like, are you fucking kidding me? Get out of here. No. Cause did he loan you the 38 grand? He lent me the 38,000.
Yeah. And that was like a ton of money to my family. Right. It was my college money. A lot of money. Right. So, I mean, that was the money put aside for me to go to college. I agreed, I'll pay to go to college. He lends me the money. Now I buy this new $13,000 inventory. Now he won't give me the money. And I realized I bought it from the government.
Like, they're going to come arrest me if I can't pay for it. So I start going knocking door to door, saying, hey, I got this great opportunity. I just bought this inventory. It's $200,000. I bought it for $13,000. And the third guy says, I'll lend you the money, but you're going to make a lot of money. I want $1,000 a week interest.
I actually thought $13,000, $1,000 a week interest, that ain't so bad. And I made the deal and I started going through the yellow pages. This is when we had yellow pages. I sold, I got the $16,000 back within three weeks to pay him back and had like 80% of the inventory left. Long story short, that near failure, by the time I was 21, this is unfortunately 31 years ago.
We were doing $100 million buying and selling closeouts by the time I was 21. So almost going out of business at 16 and seeing death in his eyes led me to build the biggest buyer and seller of closeouts in the world of athletic footwear at age 21. So like, again, value's great. Like, here I was, I thought I was a disaster. I can't make it in business. You know, I suck.
I'm going to just be a normal kid. And five years later, I'm doing $100 million a year, making $10 million a year, buying and selling athletic shoes 31 years ago. So every failure, if you embrace it, leads to your next success in my mind.
Yeah, I never, ever thought. Like, I always had the confidence, like, I got it. I can do this. It never crossed my mind for even one minute. I'm just like... Like, even in 2009, this was only 15 years ago, when I think I'm losing my entire company. I enjoyed the process. I enjoyed the experience. I enjoyed the learnings. It's like, sometimes it's good to have the goosebumps and be scared.
You know, like, what's going to happen? I don't know. I don't know how the play is going to come out. So, no, I'm just like... Run it back. Who cares? Like when we did this last year, our first WWE world, I didn't know what to expect. Was it going to work or was it going to be a failure? When we did Fanatics Fest for the first time, was it going to work or was it going to be a failure?
Like I told people two weeks before Fanatics Fest last year where 70,000 sports fans showed up. I have no idea whether it's going to work or not. You know what? Fuck it. Let's see. It was great. Now we're going to double the amount of people coming this year.
Yeah.
I'm sure they're going to tell us, you know, I love that episode. You know, that one with Michael Rubin, it sucked. I don't like that one. Okay. You know, they're going to tell us what they like and what they don't like. And we're going to use that to be better because that's what we do.
pretty great at giving money away to people that I cared about who asked me, but I never cared to spend the time to do the work. So I was really like, you were important to me, you had a cause that was important to you, I will support you. I had a life-changing moment in 2017, and I think You know, a lot of the world knows the story, but a friend of mine went to prison for not committing a crime.
He popped a wheelie on a motorcycle and broke up a fight in the airport and got a traffic ticket for one and no ticket in the other. And a judge sent him to jail for two to four years. And Meekville, it's a pretty famous story. And I sat in court watching this judge sentence him to two to four years. That moment not only changed his life, it changed my life because...
I, like, I felt it was the most powerless I ever felt. Like, you know, I owned, I was, you know, a significant owner of the Philadelphia Sixers. You know, I owned Fanatics. I was a pillar in, you know, Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, I'm watching this judge sentence my friend of two to four years for popping a wheel on a motorcycle. And... we spent the next, he got sentenced to two to four years.
We spent the next, we took us about five, five and a half months to get him out of prison. By the way, getting someone out of prison, getting a black man out of prison, that is not easy. No matter, they could have done nothing. That ain't easy. Okay. So we got, we, we got him out of prison five and a half months later, myself, um, rock nation and Jay-Z, we worked together to do it.
Showing 301–320 of 330 · page 16 of 17
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