wolf howl

Meet Michael Rubin He turned $2,500 in Bar Mitzvah money into Fanatics, a $30 Billion sports powerhouse. Born in 1972 to a Jewish family in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania, Rubin showed entrepreneurial drive early. • At 12, he started a ski-tuning shop in his parents’ basement. • At 14, using his $2,500 Bar Mitzvah money as seed capital (and a lease signed by his father), he opened Mike’s Ski and Sport in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. By 16, he was $120,000 in debt. He settled with creditors using a $37,000 loan from his father—on the condition he attend college. He briefly attended Villanova University but dropped out after a smart deal: borrowing $17,000 to buy $200,000 worth of overstock equipment at a discount, then reselling it for $75,000. He sold his ski shops and launched KPR Sports (named after his parents’ initials), a closeout company for overstock athletic gear. • By age 21 (1993), KPR hit $1 million in sales. • By 1995, it reached $50 million. In 1998, Rubin founded Global Sports Incorporated, which became GSI Commerce—a major e-commerce and logistics player. In 2011, at age 38, he sold GSI to eBay for $2.4 billion! eBay kept the fulfillment business; Rubin bought back the consumer brands at a bargain, including Fanatics (licensed sports merchandise), Rue La La, and ShopRunner. He became CEO of Fanatics and focused on scaling it aggressively: • Secured major partnerships with Nike, NFL, MLB, and over 900 leagues/teams. • During COVID-19 (2020), repurposed an MLB uniform plant to produce hospital gowns and PPE. • Raised big funding rounds: $350M (2020, valuation $6.2B), more in 2021, then $1.5B + $700M (2022, valuation hit $31 billion). • Expanded into trading cards (acquired Topps for $500M in 2022) and betting/gaming (launched 2023). From a teenage ski shop to a global leader in sports merchandise, trading cards, and more, Michael Rubin’s journey is a classic American Jewish entrepreneurial success story built on hustle, smart deals, and Values.

BREAKING: The Timberwolves-Warriors game in Minneapolis has been postponed by the NBA

Unbelievably disturbing. 57 House Republicans just joined almost all the Democrats to ensure the government can shut off your car whenever it wants.

Tom Emmer: "If you come here from a country where you have to lie, cheat, and steal -- like Somalia -- and you continue to lie, cheat, and steal and take advantage of Americans' generosity, you do not deserve to be a citizen of this country and you should be denaturalized and sent back to where you came from."

🚨 Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison justifies the anti-ICE protesters storming a church service in Minneapolis yesterday: "None of us are immune from the voice of the public."

“Most House Republicans don’t have an appetite for extending enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies.” Well, most of the 20 million Americans who will see their premiums rise don’t have an appetite for that either.