He sometimes went by the alias “Jim Stark,” though his real name was Andrew Masanto, and he’d been accused in three lawsuits filed by angry consumers of involvement with a “plant stem cell” miracle hair-loss cure. (He has denied the connection.) After I awkwardly reintroduced myself, he told me he was building a “Web3 social platform” and that he had helped create a popular cryptocurrency. I looked up its market value and saw it was almost $4 billion.
