Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

by Tom Wright

He began by telling the story of how, in February 2012, he’d undertaken his first-ever full-body medical checkup in Switzerland, only for a doctor to tell him he might have stage 2 lung cancer. “I felt my world fall apart,” Low said, sounding a bit stiff, as if trying to make sure he got the story right. “This was one of the changing moments of my life and I didn’t know what to do.” He related how he called Al Husseiny—gesturing to his friend in the audience—who had connected him with a doctor at the University of Texas’s MD Anderson Cancer Center, one of the world’s top hospitals for treating the disease. After six months of tests, the doctors told him it was only an infection. The reprieve from cancer changed his outlook on life, Low said, and later that year he set up the Jynwel Foundation to make charity a bigger part of his life. The following year, in October 2013, Low pledged $50 million to MD Anderson to fund an effort to better diagnose cancer by feeding patient data into IBM’s Watson supercomputer. Here was Low, caught on camera, carrying on as he had for his entire life, the master storyteller mixing reality with half truths, all in the service of distracting anyone from looking deeper. What you claimed to be, you were, plain and simple. Perhaps Low had been worried about dying of cancer, but he used the speech to develop another fiction, one about his origins.

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