Basically, Robert Kiyosaki, an author I’ve read in the past because I fell for his Oprah-inspired, get rich rhetoric until realizing he wasn’t really saying anything that actually seemed usable, owed $24 Million to the Learning Annex and didn’t pay it, so he lost a trial over the issue, and even though Forbes claims he’s worth $80 Million, he went the bankruptcy route to avoid actually paying his bills. I’m thinking of doing the same thing to keep AT&T from collecting on that cell phone bill they send me every month, but I haven’t pulled the trigger on that one yet.
This reminds me of a story I’ve mentioned before in the past concerning my adventures in South Korea, when I came up against the businessman known as “he graduated from Harvard”. I was working for a for-profit school at the time, and I kept hearing about this infamous Korean businessman who everyone talked about with great respect because “he graduated from Harvard”. Then the school I was working at fell into financial hell, and it was astonishingly bought by none other than the man known as “he graduated from Harvard.”
The whole curriculum was changed because “he graduated from Harvard” had great ideas for what was going to make this school as great as he was. A few months later, a new change was implemented, which consisted of paychecks forgetting to be filled out and management forgetting to answer any of their phones. One of the co-workers at the school (who was new), mentioned that she knew the man known as “he graduated from Harvard” and she wasn’t sure she would be talking about him because she was still trying to get her backpay from a previous place she worked at which he had owned as well. Hearing from other people, I started to discover that the guy known as “he graduated from Harvard” had stiffed quite a few people in the past, and this was most obviously his next attempt at grabbing a bunch of cash and running away before anyone figured it out.
I remember talking to him one day, when he was being heralded around like Caesar after returning from Gaul. He actually introduced himself as “Mr. Kim. I graduated from Harvard.” I said, “Great, I worked on my Phd at Western Michigan University and went to West Point.” He smiled, pretended he didn’t understand me (even though I spoke to him IN KOREAN) and then wandered off to introduce himself to someone else as the great Korean man who graduated from Harvard.
Soon after that, after not receiving my next month’s paycheck (two in a row), I left Korea and came home. Not even sure what happened to that school and the infamous “he graduated from Harvard”. What I found fascinating is that he had an entire life schtick of ripping people off by informing everyone that he graduated from Harvard.
This is the same sort of feeling I get from Robert Kiyosaki after having read his book. I’m sure the Learning Annex has its own version to tell as well. Hey, maybe everything was on the up and up with him, but he’s going to have a difficult time attracting people to his cause in the future. Although if “he went to Harvard” is an example, there are suckers born every minute, meaning that the money flow just never ends.