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

by Tom Wright

As of this writing in July 2018, no public charges of criminal wrongdoing have been filed against Jho Low or most of the major characters in the book, with the exception of former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Swizz Beatz, the hip-hop producer and husband of Alicia Keys, conversed animatedly with Low. At one point, Leonardo DiCaprio arrived alongside Benicio Del Toro to talk to Low about some film ideas.

It must have cost millions, Leach estimated. Here were new lovers Kanye West and Kim Kardashian canoodling under a canopy; Paris Hilton and heartthrob River Viiperi whispering by a bar; actors Bradley Cooper and Zach Galifianakis, on a break from filming The Hangover Part III, laughed as they took in the scene. It was rare to get so many top actors and musicians together at a single event outside of a big awards show.

Surrounded by his elite new friends, Low began to display a more risk-taking side to his personality.

Among themselves, some partygoers that night referred to Low as the “Asian Great Gatsby,” a reflection of how their host seemed to observe his own parties, rather than partake in them. Like Jay Gatsby’s, Low’s origins were shrouded in mystery. The guests felt the need to talk to their benefactor, but conversations were stilted and trailed off. He was friendly enough but really didn’t have anything interesting to say, instead preferring to repeatedly ensure his guests were sated. Do you like the champagne? How’s the sushi? He wasn’t hitting on women in the way other male students did when they hosted parties. In fact, he wasn’t even flirting.

One of Low’s pieces, in the November 6, 2000, issue, argued Enron was no longer a conservative gas pipeline firm but a profitable financial company that had made new markets in commodities. It was only a year before Enron collapsed amid an accounting scandal, sending its top executives to jail. But it wasn’t just that the analysis was faulty; many bankers had fallen for Enron’s lies. Low had plagiarized entire sections of his piece, word for word, from a Salomon Smith Barney report. He wrote many more such pieces, copying most of them from analyst reports on Wall Street.

A whiteboard inside printed out whatever was written on it. In the restrooms, the toilet seats adjusted automatically to the height of the occupant. There was even a wading pool for tired feet. For Malaysia at the time, this was more than cutting-edge technology: It was the most luxurious office space in the country.

Like his boss, Seet was impatient to get ahead. The key to his success at Wharton, he once boasted, was turning in essays that were big on buzzwords and short on substance.

Lol. Have definitely seen people have success with this strategy.

For Low, the deal was a seminal moment. His ability to source Middle Eastern money put him in good stead with Najib and Rosmah, reinforcing his claims to hold sway in the Arab world.

One recent estimate puts the money stashed in offshore financial centers since 1970 at $32 trillion—a figure equal to the combined economies of the United States and China—with hundreds of billions lost in tax revenues.

Wow

Even his partners were starting to distrust Low. But at that moment, he had finally hit a gusher of cash, all without holding down a regular job. He was twenty-seven years old—only three years out of college. While most of his Wharton classmates were grappling with the turmoil engulfing Wall Street and the world financial system in late 2008, Low was already sitting on a fortune that most of his finance industry classmates from Wharton could only dream of. Without producing anything, Low had shown an unusual ability to navigate the chambers of power and persuade investors by holding out the promise of large returns. He had made money for Otaiba and his other influential sponsors, strengthening his web of contacts. Not all the cash was really his—he’d have to figure out a way to get some money back to Taib—but Low was starting to develop a deal-making reputation.

He was hungry for success, and despite his gifts there were signs of a willingness to cut corners. In 1993, while employed at J.P. Morgan, Leissner acquired a doctorate in business administration from the University of Somerset. The college, which closed down a few years later, was known for selling degrees for a few thousand dollars, especially to Americans looking to burnish their credentials with a certificate from a serious-sounding British institution. Leissner began using the title “Dr.” at speaking engagements and soon after he secured a promotion to vice president at J.P. Morgan.

Suddenly, Low’s cultivation of Najib and his wife was paying dividends. Overnight, the ambitious Malaysian had the ear of the most powerful man in the country. And Najib needed a pot of money to help restore his party’s popularity. Low moved fast to cash in and save his stillborn investment fund.

At that moment, in late 2009, Low had access to more liquid cash than almost anyone on earth—and he wasn’t shy about spending it. Even before his big haul, Low had made a splash in New York and Las Vegas, dropping exorbitant sums of cash, profits from the Iskandar deal. But in the fall of 2009, armed with almost endless amounts of money, Low embarked on a period of incessant partying—and networking. Even after the payments to Obaid and others, hundreds of millions of dollars were just sitting in the Good Star account he controlled in Switzerland, for Low to deploy in any way he saw fit. There were no shareholders, no co-investors.

Low’s mark—the little-known 1MDB, a Malaysian government fund—wasn’t asking for any money back and it wouldn’t so long as he controlled it through his proxies.

Between October 2009 and June 2010—a period of only eight months—Low and his entourage spent $85 million on alcohol, gambling in Vegas, private jets, renting superyachts, and to pay Playmates and Hollywood celebrities to hang out with them.

The prime minister knew 1MDB was secretly fueling his political machinations and was not as legitimate as it appeared. He was allowing an untested twenty-eight-year-old to secretly run operations, lured into the scheme by Low’s promises the fund would enhance relationships with the Middle East and bring in investment.

1MDB was starting to channel money as “corporate social responsibility” to help encourage voters to support UMNO, the ruling party.

From the start, Najib was obsessed with popularity. Like any old-school Malaysian politician, he saw money—not ideas—as the only way to achieve popularity with voters, and he squeezed 1MDB for funds. A few months after the 1MDB board meeting, Najib told voters ahead of an upcoming local election in Sarawak that he would arrange federal funding for local projects only if the ruling-party candidate won. “You help me, I help you,” a sweating Najib promised in a stump speech ahead of the voting. It was a picture of the rot in Malaysian politics.

He's far from innocent in this

For Foxx and Hilton, who already were wealthy by any normal standard, Low offered juicy fees to emcee or appear at events. In DiCaprio’s case, the Malaysian dangled the possibility of independence from the marquee Hollywood studios. Although he was Hollywood royalty and owned a production company, Appian Way, DiCaprio still had to bow to the will of powerful studio executives, and this power dynamic had been laid bare in his faltering plans to make The Wolf of Wall Street.

Martin Scorsese, the legendary film director who had worked with DiCaprio on a number of projects, was frustrated. Even though he was at the apex of his career—recently clinching his first directing Oscar for The Departed—he could not control the studios. He’d spent five months annotating Winter’s script in preparation for filming and grumbled to people in the industry that it was wasted time. In the midst of this stalemate, Jho Low entered DiCaprio’s orbit. The Malaysian’s money offered an alternative solution, one that could provide DiCaprio and Scorsese with the Hollywood holy grail: boundless financing coupled with unfettered artistic control.

But amid all the revelry, he was also hard to know, more like a compère. The friend came to believe he was taking part in a charade of wealth, rather than genuinely having fun.

He's a real Great Gatsby

Mortality and aging cast a shadow across everyone’s life, but the überwealthy have a better chance of cheating death. For $30,000, the clinic offered a weeklong revitalization program during which patients were fed an extract derived from the livers of fetuses of black sheep. The process supposedly helped to revitalize dormant cells.

Instead of an unknown Saudi company as a partner, he had roped in IPIC, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds on the planet. Al Qubaisi was an infinitely more powerful figure than Prince Turki, a layabout seventh son of the Saudi king.

By now Low had siphoned off more than $1 billion of the 1MDB money generated by the bonds sold by Goldman Sachs.

60 percent of Malaysian households who lived on less than $1,600 a month. The 1MDB fund had amassed $10 billion in debt, which would weigh on future generations.

“This is an indictment of all of Wall Street. But it’s an indictment about something that’s in our culture, this incessant need to consume and this incessant need to obtain more and more wealth with complete disregard for anyone except yourself,” he told one interviewer.

So ironic given whos funding the movie

With $10 billion in debt and only $20 million in cash, the fund was in dire straits, hemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars a month, but Low had a game plan.

The bonds between Low and Najib remained in place. But they were frayed, with all sides now watching their own backs, distrustful of those with whom they had conspired for years. When one contact asked Low about all the money that appeared to be missing, he was quick to assign the guilt to Rosmah. “She is an avid purchaser of jewelry in the millions. Where is the money from?” he asked.

Kerr had split with Low after the first stories about him began to emerge in early 2015. In May 2017 she married Evan Spiegel, the billionaire founder of Snapchat, cutting all ties with Low.

For years, corrupt rulers have been looting their states; Prime Minister Najib Razak was just the latest in a line that stretches back decades—to the leaders overthrown in the Arab Spring of 2011, and, even further, to Sani Abacha of Nigeria, Suharto of Indonesia, and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.

It’s easy to sneer at Malaysia as a cesspool of graft, but that misses the point. None of this could have happened without the connivance of scores of senior executives in London, Geneva, New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere. Low straddled both these worlds—Malaysia and the West—and he knew exactly how to game the system.