The Four Horsemen of the Bang-pocalypse
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As you may have heard, Bang Energy’s parent company VPX recently got whammed with nearly half a billion dollars worth of legal judgments and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company is also facing down a nine-figure fee for exiting its short-lived distribution deal with PepsiCo, a firm that Bang Poster-in-Chief Jack Owoc spent the final days of September trying to citizen’s-arrest on Instagram. VPX says it needs Chapter 11 protections while it “transitions to [a] world class distribution network,” which seems like sound strategy until you remember it had a world-class distribution partner that Owoc decided to dump because line didn’t go up as fast as he wanted during the onboarding process earlier this year. Ah. Hmm. Anyway, after Bang bailed on Pepsi, the latter bought into Celsius, which is going gangbusters. And VPX is going Bang-rupt, hitting up existing creditors for another $100 million to keep the lights on while it restructures. Lesson in there somewhere. But we’re not going to dwell on it, Fingers Fam, because we’ve really got to talk about the “new” “line” of non-fungible Bang Energy tokens Owoc recently announced on Instagram.
I’ve written before about Owoc’s Instagram account, @bangenergy.ceo, where he gives 1.1 million followers direct and relentless access to the Technicolor id sloshing around between his ears. It’s powerful stuff, and as a matter of legal prudence I’m obligated to encourage you to consult a medical professional before checking it out. Whenever a new Bang-related bombshell drops, I pull up Owoc’s Instagram to see how he’s posting through it; based on the super-creatine señor’s reaction, tone, and degree of hingedness, I can get a better sense for how serious it is. It’s like Kremlinology, but if the Kremlin was a South Florida McMansion and Nikita Khrushchev had an iPhone.
Obviously, my brain is ruined. But more importantly: ever since the Monster ruling came down, and a federal court upheld the Orange Bang decision, and Bloomberg dropped its big profile on Big Jack, he’s dialed back on the ‘gram. No more shouting at the camera about lawsuits he intends to file and enemies he vows to vanquish. Troubling! Even more troubling: he recently announced that Bang is “embracing our version of the metaverse called the ‘ultraverse,’” with “some really cool NFTs.” Having written and reported in the past on NFTs and the associated scams thereof, when a company facing over half a billion dollars worth of outstanding legal settlements and rulings that is currently bankrupt decides to launch a token collection, it’s a bit of a red flag! The video Owoc posted features some of the worst “digital art” I’ve ever seen—like, even compared to other NFT projects, most of which are extremely corny themselves. But here’s where things get weird(er):