The King Of Instagram Explains His Childhood And Why He Became Such A 'Flashy Lunatic'
At face value, the 34-year-old poker star comes off as a God of the alpha male - his life is documented on the photo-sharing site, a life full of fast cars, tons of money, and hot women.
Spend a little more time flipping through his photos and reading about him, and Bilzerian just comes off as straight-up unlikeable.
Recently, Bilzerian was sued by a model/actress that claims Bilzerian threw her off a roof of a house into a pool, causing her to injur her foot. Her lawyer's threat to collect from Bilzerian recieved a response from "the King" that stated, "Like your client, the facts of the claim won't, quite, fly."
Then there's his social media presence beyond what you see on Instagram.
"My greatest fear is that someone will break in and I won't be able to decide what gun to shoot them with," he once tweeted.
In a profile from GQ, the inner-workings of Bilzerian's lifestyle is meticulously recorded, focusing especially on his formative years, which Bilzerian says were "lonely and stressful."
"The details of Dan Bilzerian's early life read more like a Marvel Comics origins story than the biography of a real human being," GQ reports.
[Bilzerian] grew up in Tampa, Florida, in an eleven-bedroom mansion that was half the size of Buckingham Palace, with its own indoor basketball court, batting cage, lake-front views, swimming pool, water slide, and an "imported volcanic rock mountain". His dad, descended from survivors of the Armenian diaspora, owned a robotics company, among other investments. Meanwhile, pretty much everyone in his family, including Dan, his mum, Terri, and his little brother, Adam, has a near-genius-level IQ.
And the apple apparently doesn't fall too far from the tree when it comes to toeing the line of the law - Bilzerian Senior, who once sued his son's Little League baseball team for slander in an argument over a $5,000 donation. The case was later dismissed.
"Basically I didn't get a ton of attention as a kid," Bilzerian has admitted in past interviews. "I guess that's why I'm such a flashy lunatic."
His father later went to prison for stock and tax fraud.
As his dad became embroiled in yet more litigation, Bilzerian arrived at school one day with an M16 machine gun in the boot of his car. The weapon, Bilzerian has since explained, was his dad's from Vietnam: "I was so proud of the damn thing, I was showing everybody." Neither the school nor the authorities had much sympathy, however. This time, in fact, Bilzerian wasn't just expelled. He says he was asked to leave Utah and not come back.
You can read GQ's entire profile of Dan Bilzerian here, and more about him on Business Insider here.
Below are some of the photos you can see on Bilzerian's wildly popular Instagram page.