The internet today is awash with promises of easy wealth, with a whole ecosystem of grifters selling people a dream of financial independence, passive income and freedom from the thankless drudgery of working life. At a time of rising precarity, when the opportunities offered by the job market seem less inspiring with every passing year, it’s not hard to understand the appeal. But does any of the advice being peddled actually work? And if it does, what kind of price might you – and your immortal soul – have to pay?

These are some of the questions filmmaker Oobah Butler explores in his new documentary How I Made £1 million in 90 Days, a satirical descent into the murky world of start-up founders, entrepreneurs, crypto-bros and hustlers of various stripes. We see one failed attempt to get-rich-quick after another, from an “ethical sweat shop”, where young children produce football shirts promoting a fictitious, religious-themed cigarette company, to a three-hour master class that no one wants, before a “meme coin” finally offers Butler a ticket to the big time. It is a depressing, often hilarious watch, which uses high-concept prankery to expose the dismal state of capitalism today, when the line between “faking it till you make it” and outright deception, even criminality, is more blurred than ever before. 

I sat down with Butler and co-creator Stan Cross to talk about the problems with hustle culture, the ethical concerns they had while making the show, and why self-delusion is the secret to success.

What do you think is the problem with hustle culture and the ideas it’s selling people? 

Oobah Butler: What I’m saying is probably quite old-fashioned, but I just find it depressing. I get it: people are struggling, and the things that make us feel secure, like housing and a reliable income, are harder to come by than they have been in a long time. However, I don’t think that having the biggest celebrities be entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, founders, and podcasters is making us any better off. Some people will say, ‘well, it’s better that young people are thinking about money’, but I don’t think it’s actually helping them.

Stan Cross: Some of these podcasters will openly talk about other people being ‘NPCs’ [non-playable characters], like everyone else is just a vessel for you to extract money from. Obviously, it hooks into the various desperations people have, in the way that pyramid schemes have done for decades, and it’s very much the same kind of scam being run over and over again: you can make loads of money, the people after you won’t but as long as the music doesn’t stop when you don’t have a chair then you’ll be fine. It’s teaching loads of young teenagers to be rapacious moguls, and I find that sad, even if that makes me sound like a very washed, No Logo-reading Gen X type.

There’s an interesting cast of characters in this documentary; some of them seemed to be quite ghoulish and others surprisingly friendly. In general, what personal qualities do you think help people achieve this particular kind of success?

Oobah Butler: Throughout the film, you see me trying all of this stuff that isn’t successful. But when you look at someone like Ikram, you realise there’s an element of spinning everything you do as a win. It’s a kind of self-delusion which shapes how people view you and the thing you do – that seems to be a quality which all of these people have. 

If you want to make money quickly, you can do it, but you have to be willing to fuck loads of people over

It seems like that kind of shamelessness is something a lot of successful people have.

Oobah Butler: We’re also constantly almost breaking the law throughout the film; at one point, people on Twitter are calling for Ikram to be sent to prison; there’s that guy whose dad has just been jailed for securities fraud, even though he’s a Fortune 500 CEO. We cut out a scene towards the end that was very close to the line in terms of what you’re allowed to do and not commit fraud. It seems like white collar crime is very common, particularly in New York. I always think about Billy McFarland, who went to prison over Fyre Festival, got out and started planning another one right away. 

Stan Cross: What led to Billy McFarland’s downfall is that he actually made the Fyre Festival a real thing. If he’d done everything up until the point of actually going ahead with it, he would probably still be well-regarded today. But instead of just making some abstract company, he was like, ‘I’m going to prove that I can put on the greatest festival of all time’, and obviously that burst his own bubble. A lot of the process of making this film was us not knowing how you make loads of money and trying to ape people who do. And it turns out there’s not much to quite a lot of it other than appearing like you already have lots of money, which then begets more.

Can you tell me about some of the ethical concerns you had while making the film?

Oobah Butler: In the 90s, my mum and dad got stung by this charming guy who sold them on what was basically a pyramid scheme. My dad said that crypto reminded him a lot of that, and it was quite unusual to hear him speak so frankly about how hurt he was by that deception. From the start, I didn’t want to make a film about crypto, partly because it felt too obvious, and I just didn’t think it was funny. But other than the sweat shop and the educational platform, which we planned, this film is verité – you’re just following me doing things. So the meme coin thing happened completely organically; it just kept coming up. We were trying to make a film about get-rich-quick at a time when this is the scheme, so it was kind of unavoidable.

Stan Cross: If we did a meme coin, we couldn’t work out any way that we would give people their money back if it went wrong. Someone was inevitably going to get left carrying the bag, and we realised there was no vaguely satirical point that would justify people getting stung at the end of it. We did hamper ourselves, but I guess that was part of it, a way of saying: if you want to make money quickly, you can do it, but you have to be willing to fuck loads of people over. 

What surprised you the most throughout the process?

Stan Cross: The amount of money ($8 million) that Oobah gets offered at the end by the Wall Street Guy, and how blasé he was about that.

Oobah Butler: And the fact it’s legal is what shocked me. Isn’t this how the 2008 financial crash happened? People constantly leveraging their lines of credit in a way that’s completely unsustainable? And if I’d made a million, I’d have been charged almost half of it in tax, but in the case of this loan, I wouldn’t have had to pay anything. 

If you’d accepted that loan, what would you have been on the hook for? What would it have meant in practice?

Stan Cross: Obviously, it would depend on the legalese and the finer details of the loan, but the interest is astoundingly small for the amount of money that’s being offered. In the most straightforward way, you could have probably bought an entire street of houses, and all the various ways that you can financialise that could have been an entire new route that was open to you overnight, where you are suddenly now a property mogul.

Oobah Butler: It’s like a personal relationship thing; you just have to convince the people at these almost concierge financial services that you’re worthy of the money.

Stan Cross: When we tried to make an actual company, a real business that sold physical products, no investors were interested. But as soon as you go much more abstract and aim for higher numbers, suddenly the wallet starts being loosened. I realised the way I understood the world – that you’ve got to go to the bank with your little documents that show your profit margins and how your first year is going to work – is such little league stuff.

When we tried to make an actual company, a real business that sold physical products, no investors were interested. But as soon as you go much more abstract and aim for higher numbers, suddenly the wallet starts being loosened

Given this film is satirising the false promises of hustle culture, did you worry that the point might be undermined by the fact that you end up succeeding? It’s no doubt easier for someone, like Oobah, with an existing profile to make a million quid.

Oobah Butler: That was a constant conversation for us: how much do we want to look at the fact that my approach in this film is very different to how most people watching it would be able to go about it? There was a lot of stuff we didn’t do because of that, and we also tried to do things which anyone could do, like buying an article in Forbes magazine calling me a business genius. I would say the educational platform was the thing we did most based on me, and we only sold one master class in 24 hours. But then again, the only reason I get the offer at the end is predicated on making a meme coin with my name. So is that a bad example?

Stan Cross: I don’t know, because so much of this sphere is about people gaining notoriety or having a captive audience that they milk in some way. If you look at these master classes, they’re all basically saying different variations of ‘this is how I make money: I cultivated an audience and then I sell them master classes. Buy my master class and find out how to do that yourself’. It’s like a snake eating itself. 

How I Made £1 million in 90 Days airs on Channel 4 tonight (October 16) and will be available to stream online.