The plan was to walk around downtown and sell $10 memberships to people, granting them an all-you-can-eat-and-drink pass to local restaurants participants were given T-shirts and merchandise with a 10X logo. The first iteration of 10X launched with a noble goal: to help Park City reopen amid the pandemic. His spiral with nitrous oxide came at a time when people were finding new ways to spend his money and Hsieh seemed all too willing to spend himself broke, thanks to a nonsensical incentive scheme he had devised called 10X. Broken glass, broken plates all over the ground. “His room looked like a homeless shelter,” his brother Andy said later. While Hsieh was initially seen at mealtimes and held meetings in various rooms at the ranch to discuss the stream of projects being pitched to him, he gradually started spending more time in his bedroom, and would hold court while sitting in bed, surrounded by nitrous oxide canisters. Visitors who came to see Hsieh encountered guards in different wings of the property, as if they were entering a fortified estate. The scare prompted him to hire a legion of black-clothed security guards to form a human perimeter around the ranch. Īt one point paranoia also took hold, and Hsieh was convinced one morning that a Zappos executive named Tyler Williams was in town, trying to stage an intervention. Over time, his physical appearance changed, and his weight fell below 100 pounds, leaving his frame looking skeletal.Ĭhef Executive: When Hsieh moved to Park City, he dreamed of creating a utopian community similar to the one he built in Las Vegas with family, friends and loyal Zapponians-at any cost. On another occasion, he tried depriving himself of food and water to eliminate the need to use the bathroom. One time, he stepped on glass, cut his foot, and walked around the Park City ranch leaving streaks of blood on the floor-a trail, he said, that would make it easy to find him. His near-constant stream of nitrous oxide prompted strange behavior. By one estimate, he was using more than 50 a day.
In between cigarettes, Hsieh was inhaling from Whip-It canisters like he was drinking water from a bottle. Excessive nitrous oxide use can lead to brain damage, and some teenagers have died from chemical asphyxiation. While it’s illegal to inhale the gas, the practice has been popular for decades among teenagers who can’t legally buy alcohol and festival revelers seeking a cheap, quick high.īut the brain can only handle so much. Better known as laughing gas for its use at dental offices, nitrous oxide is commercially available as an everyday kitchen item: the cartridges used in whipped cream machines, known as Whip-Its.
He became convinced that inhaling nitrous oxide was a way to heighten his blood oxygen levels and eliminate the need for sleep. In the weeks following his release from the hospital, Hsieh had become focused on the study of biohacking to increase his personal output. If people had concerns about taking money from a man drifting further from reality due to excessive drug use and other erratic behavior, few had seemed to consider the Faustian bargain they were entering-an oversight that took vivid form when Hsieh found another destructive fascination.
With Lee overseeing the finances, he could also help weed out people who were taking advantage of his brother.Īndy’s request came with a sense of urgency, as funds had been hemorrhaging from Tony’s accounts for many months. Coming to Park City made sense for multiple reasons, he explained. Sensing Lee’s hesitancy, Hsieh turned to one of the people at the dinner and suggested that if he could convince Lee to stay, he would receive a 10 percent commission, or $150,000.Īfter dinner, Andy pulled Lee aside. As he had done with others, Hsieh offered to pay double Lee’s current salary, which meant he would be earning $1.5 million a year. Lee’s role would involve overseeing all finances in the Park City ventures. During a dinner in late July at a restaurant on Main Street, Hsieh told him that he was turning Park City into a community similar to the one he had built in downtown Las Vegas a few years earlier, but better. Lee was reluctant to entertain the idea of uprooting his life in Texas and to leave a comfortable job to join the mania of Tony Hsieh’s world, but he agreed to a meeting.
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