How Oba Butler Joke Convinced Venture Capitalists To Give Him Over A Million Dollars

Not long In his new documentary, Oba Butler tells the co-founders of his fledgling company, Drops, that they need to create a luxury suitcase that “looks like a bomb” and sells for $200,000.

Right off the bat, I think his quest to get £1 million in 90 days might end early.

But I am wrong.

Butler is a British prankster documentary maker known for stunts like getting Amazon to sell its drivers’ urine as energy drinks or creating a fake restaurant called the Shed and playing TripAdvisor to make it London’s best restaurant on the platform. His latest documentary, made for Britain’s Channel 4, is called How I made £1 million in 90 days. Set in London and New York, the film depicts the world of startups, venture capital, cryptocurrencies and what ultimately seems like a lot of nonsense called get-rich-quick.

Butler opens the film by saying that, as someone who didn’t grow up with money and isn’t particularly motivated by it, he’s fascinated by the fact that people “idolize” wealthy entrepreneurs.

“It came from a place where I wanted to understand why … everyone is so obsessed with money,” he tells WIRED. “And I’m not talking about survival. I’m not talking about affordability. I’m talking about … being addicted to making money.”

His only rules for getting the £1 million ($1.3 million) are that he is not allowed to break the law and that he is responsible for whatever costs he incurs to get there. He uses several strategies to raise cash, including just asking rich people for it (which doesn’t go over well) and generating publicity for the crypto company UNFK by doing things like tricking bankers into committing crimes on camera. He also creates Drops, a company that makes headlines for its controversial stunts and then tries to capitalize on the attention by selling “extremely expensive” items.

Butler takes advice from Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdoun Ismail, who quickly introduces himself as Butler’s co-founder at Drops and seems enthusiastic at first, thinking the company is already “worth at least $10 million” just because there are two people attached to it and they might be able to sell the Madison Square Garden story for a year. Their brainstorming session includes plans to buy the first piece of land on Mars and sell the opportunity to name the “first branded species”. But after Butler suggests a bomb-like suitcase and a pair of “real ad-blocking sunglasses” that completely obliterate the user’s vision, Magdon-Ismail temporarily ghosts him.

Butler then embarks on a memecoin adventure that goes south, before returning to Drops to launch “the UK’s first legal children’s spirits shop in over a century”. He gets around not paying the child laborers by arguing that since he is filming the children for the documentary, they are technically performers. His underage employees help him come up with marketing ideas to sell custom football jerseys a counterfeit religious cigarette brand called Holy Smokes. Although the clothing line is covered in GQ, Butler doesn’t sell any clothes worth a million pounds.