Selling the empire

JMJK was the whole thing. The store I built with nothing, the run that paid for the mansion, the proof that I wasn't just another kid on the internet talking. By early 2016 it was also the only asset I had left, so I put it on the market.

It sold for $525K through a broker, seller-financed. Seller-financed means the buyer pays you over time, out of money the business is supposed to keep making. It means the check is a promise.

He put roughly $60K to $70K down. The broker ate most of that. Somewhere between $15K and $20K actually reached my hands. That was the exit. Five figures for the company that had made me rich at twenty.

I'd like to tell you I put it to work. I didn't. All of it went into numbing the feeling of being a failure. That's not a confession I enjoy making. It's just where the money went.

The rest was supposed to arrive in payments. It never arrived. The buyer stopped shipping customer orders. He went quiet. He never made another payment, and he burned the business down from the inside.

That's the part nobody explains at the closing table. Seller financing doesn't sell the risk. It sells the control and keeps the risk. I handed a stranger the only thing I had ever built that worked, and then I watched from the outside while he drove it into a wall.

$525K on paper. About $15K in my pocket. Nothing left standing.