Tim’s future plans might be crumbling all around him.
Right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool’s plan to found a media company is allegedly collapsing amid infighting over footage of the Jan 6. Capitol riots and allegations he held a cat hostage for leverage over one of his partners in the venture, the Daily Beast reported on Wednesday.
Pool first came to prominence in the Occupy Wall Street era and bills himself as a liberal journalist, but a rational and cool-headed one so alienated and disgusted enough by illiberal leftists that he voted for Donald Trump. As one might expect, in practice, Pool seems to act very much like a professional panderer parroting whatever pet grievances a certain segment of extremely online right-wingers are nursing at any given time, be it “Cancel Culture,” whether or not clowns are racist, or how the media is a bunch of hysterical elitists. Pool spent most of the Trump presidency insisting that the Donald was a strategic genius whose every move was designed to goad liberals into politically damaging overreactions and prognosticating a Trump victory in the 2020 elections, later promoting hoaxes alleging mass Democratic voter fraud and insisting Trump’s loss is actually very damaging for Democrats.
This grift has proved very lucrative for Pool; he’s hawked merch like survival rations to gullible conservatives and, according to the Beast, owns “a million-dollar mansion in the Maryland woods, complete with a podcast studio and a skate park.” More recently, he’s tried to pivot his career as a podcaster/streamer into founding a larger media operation, which would be a big switch from mostly reading other people’s content in an angry voice and is where the apparently very lengthy and headache-inducing dispute over the cat comes in.
Pool and his now-former partners in the venture, Emily Molli and former Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro, raised $1.2 million from investors on crowdfunding platform Wefunder to build a “decentralized news network” named Subverse—later redubbed SCNR—that would be heavily tied to Pool’s 1.24 million YouTube subscribers, 800,000+ Twitter followers, and nearly 170,000 followers on Facebook. Molli, the startup’s chief content officer, is the owner of the aforementioned cat, while Castoro apparently helped lend the venture some Vice-style energy.
According to the Beast, Molli and Castoro promised backers in November 2020 that SCNR would “yank what you thought you knew straight out your nose like Tutankhamen’s brain.” They added that backers displeased with a lack of YouTube updates that “YouTube sucks a fat one,” and said that complaining through Wefunder is the behavior of a “ding-dong.”
