How I Bought a Private Jet By Selling $10 Subscriptions to 404 Media
Account
Log in
Subscribe
Navigation
Home
About
RSS
Support/FAQ
Podcast
FOIA Forum Archive
Merch
Advertise
Privacy
Contact Us/Tips
Follow us
Twitter<br>Bluesky<br>Mastodon<br>Instagram<br>TikTok<br>Facebook<br>RSS
Advertisement
•
Go ad free
LARPing<br>How I Bought a Private Jet By Selling $10 Subscriptions to 404 Media
Jason Koebler
Jun 30, 2026<br>at 9:01 AM
My journey inside the world of LARPing, where hustlebros pretend to be rich for TikTok.
Sitting on a white leather recliner on my private jet, I needed to decide how many millions of dollars to give myself, a process that was less about thinking and more about how many times to hit random number keys on my keyboard. I watched 404 Media’s revenue graph go up and to the right.<br>I clicked record on my camera, wanting to show my followers how hard I work, even when I’m getting shuttled off to exotic locations. “We’re here on the PJ, off to Ibiza. Got the passport, got the prosecco. We’re hustling. 404media.co,” I say. “You want to get rich? Publish journalism on the internet. I just published something.”<br>Because I’d sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of subscriptions today alone, I wanted to show my followers just how quickly I’d been making money. I opened the Stripe app on my phone and decided how many subscriptions I wanted to sell. I used a slider bar—again, somewhat at random—to select 164 new subscribers, spaced out every .5 seconds. I clicked a button that said “Start Burst.” Notifications begin streaming across my phone’s Lock Screen. I hold it up to the camera.<br>“Let me show you how easy it is. Just published,” I say, holding my phone up to the camera. “New Payment from Stripe,” the notifications read. “You received a payment of $100 from rachel.thompson@gmail.com,” one says. Then John Wright subscribes. Then Megan Johnson. Then Daniel Thomas. Honestly, I can’t keep up. “Ten dollars, ten dollars, a hundred dollars a hundred dollars,” I say, pointing at the phone. “Take my easy course online, learn how to become rich like us.”<br>“Check out the dash,” I say, grabbing my laptop and showing the camera my Stripe earnings report, or “dashboard.” “This is from today only. $51,000 gross, $2.7 million so far this year. It’s easy. Take my online course, join the community, I’ll show you how to be rich.”
0:00
/0:21
1×
I stop recording. In reality, I was sitting alone in photo studio Olympic 4, inside a warehouse jammed between the 5 freeway, a railway for cargo trains, and the largely dry, concrete Los Angeles River. Moments earlier I called a receptionist because the code for my one-hour rental ($65) wasn’t working. I didn’t even have the keys to my fake, indoor private jet. I had to stop recording because my voice inside the private jet was overpowered first by a power saw outside, then by an ambulance siren. My subscribers, my Stripe dashboard, my notifications were all fake of course. My prosecco was real; I bought it at Ralph’s for a party a few months ago on sale for $6. It didn’t matter. I was LARPing. It was going well. Buy my course.
Over the last few years, I have become mildly obsessed with hustle bros: The Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube influencers who claim to have become wildly wealthy by doing some sort of hustle. Some of them make AI babes they monetize via OnlyFans competitors. Some are into crypto. Others do real estate. Some do clipping. Some do AI slop. Some do drop shipping. The thing they all have in common is that they all have an online course to sell you, telling you exactly how they got rich and how you can too. Subscribe for $30 a month and you’ll gain access to their Whop course (a Patreon-like platform popular for hosting hustlebro courses), their Discord community, and, critically, all their secrets. Because I’ve reported endlessly on various hustlebro schemes, I have bought many of these courses, and they’re almost universally the same: They feature shitty, usually AI-generated (or poorly written) PDF guides, a community that has just a handful of people in it, various webinars, video content, and, sometimes, access to various vibe coded software.<br>Using these simple strategies, they make monthly recurring revenue, allowing them to hustle from anywhere. Why are you, a loser, sitting at home scrolling Instagram Reels on your phone when you could be making and selling AI porn subscriptions while poolside in Ibiza, at a stoplight in your Maybach, while poppin’ champagne on the PJ, or while getting bottle service at the club?
0:00
/0:11
1×
Critical to the hustlebro fantasy is the “dashboard,” which are screenshots and videos of the analytics page for whatever platform you’re using. This is the number of subscribers and revenue you get from hustling, and posting these in your videos or in a slideshow is both a flex and is nominally proof that you are indeed rich and that your course is therefore worth buying.<br>The extremely obvious truth (which is...