Jho Low -- seen here with "Top Chef" host Padma Lakshmi -- allegedly swiped more than $5 billion from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund, using it to live the high life.
In April 2013, a socially awkward 30-year-old Asian financier named Low Taek Jho — aka Jho Low — recorded a ballad, “Void of a Legend,” at Jungle City Studios in Chelsea.
Friends including rapper/DJ Swizz Beatz were there to assist on the vanity project when Busta Rhymes and Pharrell Williams dropped by.
Low, inebriated, called out to Rhymes, “Yo! I own you! You’re my bitch!”
Rhymes was put out but said nothing as Williams made small talk to cover everyone’s embarrassment. Low had meant nothing negative. It was, to him, a clunky, playful reference to the $100 million he had just spent for a share of EMI Music Publishing, one of the top publishers in the music world and with clients including Rhymes.
It was also a rare misstep for Low among his celebrity friends, whom he usually treated with great reverence and unprecedented generosity, such as the time he gifted a $9.2 million Basquiat to his good buddy Leonardo DiCaprio.
According to the new book, “Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World,” by Wall Street Journal reporters Tom Wright and Bradley Hope (Hachette), out Tuesday, Low saved his greatest misdeeds for the world of finance — siphoning at least $5 billion from a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund he helped create called 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB.
At the height of his recklessness, the authors estimate that Low may have had access to more cash at any one time than anyone in history.
Low was born to a moderately wealthy family in Malaysia in 1981. As a teen, having learned the importance of high-status friends from his jet-setting father, who would fly in Swedish models for parties, he befriended Riza Aziz, whose stepfather was Malaysian Defense Minister Najib Razak.
Low threw his first elaborate parties while a student at Wharton. For his 20th birthday, he rented out one of Philadelphia’s hottest clubs, Shampoo, for $40,000, much of which he later reneged on. He cold-called sororities to ensure he had the hottest women at his bash and became known as “the Asian Great Gatsby” when, at the shindig itself, he had little to say to guests beyond, “How do you like the champagne?”
For a gambling trip to Atlantic City’s Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, Low sent a note inviting Ivanka Trump, then a student at Wharton. He told friends she declined because “she would never set foot in one of her father’s ‘skeevy’ casinos.”
He also developed a strong crush on Paris Hilton, becoming so enamored that he watched “House of Wax,” her debut film, “half a dozen times, spurring eye rolls from his roommates.”
After college, he returned to Malaysia with a plan to work the contacts that he’d met at Wharton and elsewhere, fo