The Author Of The Story About The $72 Million Dollar High School Trader Is Refusing To Take Responsiblity For Getting Duped

SOURCE – The New York City high schooler who gained overnight fame after he told a reporter he’d made $72 million trading stocks on his lunch break now says he’s made it all up. He now claims to have no clue where New York Magazine came up with the huge figure. Meanwhile, the reporter whose story made Islam an internet star insists she was shown bank statements that show he’s worth eight figures, which would mean at least $10 million. A firestorm of criticism was unleashed in the wake of Islam’s retraction on New York Magazine and the original article’s author Jessica Pressler. Detractors say the writer failed to do appropriate fact checking for her article. The Observer’s Ken Kurson writes: ‘Even if this working-class kid had somehow started with $100,000 as a high school freshman on day one at Stuy High, he’d have needed to average a compounded annualized return of something like 796% over the three years since. C’mon, man.’ Pressler responded to the criticism through Twitter on Monday morning. ‘We saw a bank statement confirming the eight figures, & I’m comfortable with what’s in the piece,’ she wrote. So, as the Observer and everyone else wants to know: where did Pressler come up with the $72 million figure? In Islam’s own words, ‘The number’s a rumor.’

 
KFC blogged about everybody finally realizing this story was impossible because this kid isn’t the fat, Muslim, 17-year-old version of Bradley Cooper in Limitless; now the blowback is starting to hit the author of the story, Jessica Pressler. Naturally, she won’t say that she fucked up and didn’t do enough to check her facts and took a high school senior at his word; instead she’s decided to hunker down, say that she saw a bank statement that confirmed Mo Islam is worth tens of millions of dollars and that she’s comfortable with what she wrote.

To be fair, the outcome isn’t great for her either way because one way or the other, she’s terrible at her job: either she’s too lazy to do her due diligence (the whole three year average of a 796% compounded annualized return bit probably would have been a giveaway), or she’s too stupid to use plain old common sense and realize there’s no way a kid made $72 million trading stocks “on his lunch break”, or she’s so gullible that she’ll report anything that anyone tells her as fact.

Whatever the case may be, I’d like to pitch Jessica Pressler a story for her first piece at Rolling Stone (only a matter of time before they hire her since they have no qualms with writers who are too incompetent, agenda driven, or lazy to do their jobs); I think it’s the perfect kick off to start that new job with a bang: It’s the story of a smut blogger named Pops with an IQ of 200, a bank account that hovers around half a trillion dollars, and a cock that measures in at a girthy 13 inches with balls that are smooth as eggs. I’d say my proof is at least as strong as Mo Islam’s, so let’s just run with it Jess!

Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper for scale