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The Vice co-founder predicted that the company would be worth $50 billion sometime in this decade, and acted accordingly, turning down the opportunity in 2015 to sell it for $3 billion to Disney. It’s understandable why Smith continues to lay low. Smith himself, once ubiquitous, has spent the last few years on a disciplined campaign to lower his own profile, and also declined to comment.

The company remains tight-lipped on Smith’s role and his personal gains.

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He bought the $23 million Santa Monica mansion made famous by the movie Beverly Hills Cop.īut as investors sell off what’s left of Vice, it’s increasingly clear that the lavish spending helped create an illusion of prosperity.Īnd close watchers of the company continue to wonder: Where has Smith, who remains Vice’s executive chairman, gone? And, more to the point, how much cash did he extract from Vice?

He handed out bonuses in the form of fistfuls of (company) cash at a holiday party. Vice’s image as a new kind of culture business intertwined with his own image as a big new media mogul: He drove a vintage Rolls Royce, bought a mountain in Costa Rica, and reportedly dropped over $300,000 on a single Las Vegas dinner. After Vice raised $500 million in 2014, its CEO and co-founder Shane Smith remarked to a friend that he’d become “post-economic.”īrash, decadent, and charming, Smith was the burly, bearded face of Vice Media through its decade of apparent prosperity, from the late aughts until the late 2010s.