404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler said he rented an indoor private-jet set in Los Angeles and filmed himself pretending to be a rich online-course hustler, part of a reported piece on what 404 Media describes as TikTok wealth LARPing.
The setup was deliberately fake. Koebler said the “private jet” was photo studio Olympic 4, a one-hour rental that cost $65, inside a warehouse near the 5 freeway, a cargo railway and the mostly dry Los Angeles River. He said he had to call a receptionist because the access code did not work, and he did not have keys to the set.
On camera, Koebler performed the standard private-jet business-guru routine: travel props, alcohol, claims of constant work, and a pitch for followers to buy an online course. He said he posed as if 404 Media subscriptions had made him rich, while sitting in a white leather recliner on the set.
Fake payments, real mechanics
Koebler said the money shown in the video was fabricated. He described generating fake Stripe payment notifications on his phone, including names and email addresses presented as new customers. In the staged clip, he set a burst of 164 new subscriber alerts, spaced half a second apart, using a slider and a “Start Burst” button.
The notifications were designed to look like real payment alerts, including $10 and $100 payments. Koebler also said he showed a fake Stripe earnings dashboard on a laptop, with the staged figures showing $51,000 in gross revenue for the day and $2.7 million for the year.
Koebler said the performance was meant to mimic “hustlebros” who pose as rich for TikTok. The excerpt published by 404 Media does not say that Koebler bought a private jet or made the displayed revenue from subscriptions. It says the opposite: the jet, subscriber alerts, dashboard and payment flow were props in a staged demonstration.
Some props were less digital. Koebler said the prosecco in the clip was real, though he bought it months earlier at Ralph’s for $6. The recording also ran into the normal problems of a cheap studio shoot: he said he stopped filming after noise from a power saw and then an ambulance siren overpowered his voice.
A paywalled investigation
404 Media published the piece under its LARPing tag and framed it as a look inside online wealth performance. The outlet describes itself as an independent publication owned and written by human journalists, and the rest of Koebler’s piece sits behind membership and email signup prompts.
Based on Koebler’s account, the useful part is the mechanism. A rented luxury-looking room, fake payment alerts, a fake dashboard and a confident pitch can produce the appearance of a booming internet business quickly and cheaply. The stunt shows how little infrastructure is required to manufacture the visual evidence many social platforms reward.
This story draws on original reporting from 404 Media.
