Trillion Dollar Man:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/kids-were-tougher-in-the-nineties-what-happens-in-dan-penas-27000-tough-love-seminars/
Dan Pena has a picture of Adolf Hitler on his wall, but not any old picture. You know, not a simple portrait with Bavarian hills in the background, or a snap of the Führer doting on Helga Goebbels, Joseph’s daughter. No, Pena has a Hitler collage – Nazis marching through Nuremberg, a swastika blotting out the sky, hellfire on the horizon and, the final layer, a red and murderous photograph of the man himself superimposed on to the right-hand side.
The collage hangs almost dead centre on Pena’s ‘wall of influencers’, a gallery of 91 men and women who inspired him to become the high-performance individual he is today: a businessman worth $500 million and an online celebrity with millions of followers. To the right of Hitler is Joseph Stalin and to the left is Jesus. To Jesus’s left is Vlad the Impaler, and above Vlad is Pena’s father Manny. ‘They’re not all good people,’ says Katherine, Pena’s PA. ‘Look, there’s Donald Trump.’
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‘I used to be fortunate enough to run some of the money for the Du Ponts [one of the wealthiest families in the US],’ Pena says a few minutes into our meeting. ‘Their kid was a spoiled brat.’ Du Ponts are born rich, but Pena comes from a strict family in the barrios of Los Angeles. ‘My dad ran me over,’ Pena says. ‘I used to have a propensity for running my tricycle into the street. My dad told my mum: “I’m going to hit him with the car, so he knows what it feels like.” And so my dad’s in the car and he went to nudge me and the chrome went through my knee and it dragged me on to the street. My mother is screaming: “Manny, Manny, Manny, you’re going to kill him!” “No,” he said. “I’m not going to kill him, but he’s never going on to the street again.”’
Pena, 79, says that his ‘superhero father’ gave him the values and character to turn savings of $820 into a multi-million-dollar oil business. In 1993, after making his fortune, Pena began his seminars, the unique selling point being his own ‘tough dad’ act. ‘Back in the 1990s, allegedly I used to hit the students,’ he says. ‘I will neither confirm nor deny that. But the kids were tougher in the 1990s.’ Nowadays he just gets in students’ faces and yells things such as: ‘Is every man in Britain a mealy-mouthed weenie?’ ‘Do you realise that Russians think we’re all faggots?’ ‘You oughta go home to your mother… BOOM! BOOM! KILL YOUR PARENTS. Metaphorically speaking, of course.’
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