The Vape Company That Broke Up a Family
Dan Bilzerian, an early Instagram superstar, got into the vape business with help from his father, a Wall Street legend and convicted felon. Then things got weirder.
From Bloomberg Businessweek, October 2026
Dan Bilzerian emerged from the elevator on the fourth floor of a Los Angeles courthouse in a three-piece suit, his hair in a mul-hawk. It was January 2025, and he was just as stout as he’d been at his peak almost a decade earlier, when images of his action-figure physique, often surrounded by beautiful women or automatic weapons, brought him tens of millions of social media followers. That day, though, the 44-year-old influencer was alone, with no girls, no guns, no entourage.
Bilzerian had been fired as chief executive officer of his vape company, Ignite International Brands Ltd., and removed from the board. With an $8 million loan coming due, he’d put his Las Vegas mansion on the market. Most of his net worth was tied up in the company’s stock, and Ignite was now controlled by the man who’d orchestrated his ouster: his father, Paul. In the 1980s, Paul Bilzerian became one of America’s most notorious corporate raiders. After serving time for securities fraud, he relocated to the Caribbean. There he ran a business empire and had spent years quietly funneling cash into Ignite.
Standing in the courthouse hallway, Bilzerian scrolled to a video of his two cats, Thelma and Louise, who’d been sprawled out in his Gulfstream IV during the flight from Vegas. The quiet scene was a sharp contrast from the antisemitic conspiracy theories he’d been posting on social media. Asked how he was doing, he peeled his eyes away from the screen. “Not very good,” he said. “I’m in court.”
Bilzerian was there to defend himself against a defamation suit. The plaintiff was an Ignite executive who’d been fired in 2020 after refusing to sign off on expenses that Bilzerian had described as business-related. These included a $50,000 alligator-skin bed frame, $65,000 worth of marijuana pipes and $260,000 to rent a private island. The case wasn’t going well for Bilzerian. Ignite refused to pay his legal fees, and he and the company had separate representation.
Four months later, the trial was coming to a close. The plaintiff had won a $6.5 million jury verdict against both Bilzerian and his former company, and the jury was about to decide on punitive damages. Bilzerian feared Ignite would foist the shared judgment onto him. In that case he would have had to crawl back to his father and sell his shares to the company at a fraction of their worth, which he estimated to be more than $50 million.
Dan Bilzerian during his influencing prime in 2015.Photographer: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
During a break, Bilzerian’s attorney approached the bench. “Your honor,” he said. “I think it’s unorthodox, but my client requested if he could make the closing argument.”
The courtroom perked up, anticipating a fiasco. The judge, a stern woman with an impressive reserve of patience, asked Bilzerian if he understood the risks.
“This is life-ruining amounts of money,” he replied. “I want to be able to represent my side.”
Soon enough, Bilzerian was making his case to the jury. “I spent a long time building an authentic brand,” he began. “It’s not really who I am today.” By the time things started to go wrong with Ignite, he said, he was a figurehead and shouldn’t be held responsible for anything the jury decided the vape business had done wrong. “My dad hijacked the company.”
It was hard to know whether this was a rare moment of truth, or if any of what Bilzerian was saying was real. As Ignite’s former CEO and a onetime star in the influencer game, he knew how to trade on his image to sell vapes to followers and his company to investors. His father, meanwhile, had spent decades in and out of trouble with the law while attempting to take over companies, and he’d mostly come out on top. Their relationship had inarguably been difficult, but they’d spent years working closely together too. It was rarely clear who was on whose side, or which of them was in charge. Interviews for this story with both father and son only led to more of that ambiguity. “There are good guys and bad guys in this story, like almost all stories,” Paul told me. “I doubt you have figured out which are which.”
Still, the feud between father and son, which would eventually play out in multiple courts in three countries, offered a rare window into the scale of both men’s operations. There was a stem cell clinic in Antigua, an oil and gas company in Australia, a citizenship-by-investment program in St. Kitts. Despite both men’s notoriety, Paul Bilzerian’s backstory was proof to a certain kind of investor that he could deliver on at least one of his promises: secrecy. As Bloomberg Businessweek can exclusively reveal, a good chunk of the cash Dan had burned through at Ignite traced back to Roger Ver, better known to the world as Bitcoin Jesus, who’s only now coming forward.
Ver and the elder Bilzerian grew close enough that Ver thought of him as a relative, according to his lawyer, Jeffrey Neiman. “That’s part of what’s made this so difficult for Roger,” Neiman says. “Family doesn’t do this to family.”