Background

Note from Cyclonejane: I’ve done no independent research on the following facts, but as far as I know, the common knowledge I have assembled here is correct as of early December 2022. Please check the homepage to see the posts on related background material, Tate’s Banishment and Misogyny.

Getting into the public eye. Andrew Tate, nicknamed “King Cobra” for his swift, dangerous striking power as a martial arts professional and “Top G” for his alpha male leadership qualities, is a former professional athlete turned entrepreneur and Internet personality. Like the Kardashians, Tate, and to a lesser extent, his younger brother, Tristan, became famous by making themselves famous, getting in front of cameras for television and the Internet as often as possible.

Both Tate brothers were successful professional kickboxers when they last resided in England, although Andrew, a four-time light heavyweight world champion, was better at the sport and better known for it than Tristan, who was nonetheless a two-time European champion.

Both Tate brothers appeared in reality television shows. A twenty-three-year-old Tristan, looking tan and scrumptious, appeared barely clad on Shipwrecked 2011-2012, which can still be viewed on YouTube as of this writing. Andrew got kicked off Big Brother after a kinky sex video mysteriously surfaced. Worthy of Kim K herself, this opus featured Andrew going through the motions of beating a blonde with a belt. Both say the activity was consensual, and Andrew claims the fallout from the mini-scandal amounted to his receiving hundreds of DMs with queries such as, “Me next, Andrew?”

Acquiring wealth. While kickboxing and reality television were glamorous ego inflaters, they were neither steady nor outstanding sources of income. A high-level boxer makes millions, Tate explains, but the best kickboxing paydays are modest. He claims that the most he ever got for a fight was 100K, or perhaps it was 80k or maybe 200K, depending on the day he is doing the explaining. Where his personal life and personal wealth are concerned, Tate is champion of obfuscation.

Given the limited payoffs from their glamor incomes, the brothers also worked day jobs, mainly in sales, at one point forming their own company to sell television advertising. Hustle and persuasive rhetoric made them successful in that arena.

However, Our Hero wanted to be really rich. Really, really rich. Flaunting a Ferrari rich. Lamborghini-owning rich. Multiple-bitches-in-your-bed rich. Thus, he began turning his first-rate mind to the task of learning, as he puts it, “How money works.”

The Web cam business. The brothers got rich exploiting female bodies for a Web cam business that Andrew started, sort of a prototype of OnlyFans. (They now own, or perhaps only Tristan owns, actual OnlyFans studios. It is all rather vague.) Andrew’s stories about setting up and running the business, some of them clearly apocryphal, comprise a surprisingly funny collection of Internet clips.

Tate says he wanted to open a strip club, but he lacked the startup money. He says he got the idea for the Web cam business while listing his assets, including eight “girlfriends” in cities with where he fought professionally. Well, four, six, or eight girlfriends, that is, depending on the version of the story he feels like telling. The girlfriends were a legacy of his martial arts career: apparently, the victor pretty much gets his choice of the rings. He invited these women to a meeting in London to discuss a business proposal, and when he pointed out that he had slept with them all, two of them got up and left. Or maybe four of them left. Depending . . .

Tate maintains that he worked hard. He rented and maintained workplaces; he purchased and operated computer and camera equipment; he utilized his business expertise, handling paperwork for contracts, payroll, and taxes; and he provided security for his employees. In some versions of this story, he cheats the women of part of the earnings he promised them. In other versions, he is strictly honest with them. Sometimes he says he contracted separately with each woman, specifying how much flesh she would display and what percentage she would receive of the money she brought to the business.

Tate maintains that he exploited no one. (“What woman gets a percentage of the till if she is working at McDonald’s?”) He also claims that sleeping with the women, sometimes four at a time, was onerous (“Too many legs to crawl over when you get up to take a piss”), but somehow he managed. He generalizes from his Web cam experiences to say that as employees, women are stupid and lazy. “Tell a man he can make a thousand dollars an hour, and he’ll work eighteen hours a day. Tell a woman she can make a thousand dollars an hour, and she will work one day a week.” (There are variants of that quotation, of course.)

Because the women tended to give problematic answers when queried by the suckers, who typed in their questions and comments while paId remotely, Tate had to give the women dumb keyboards and teach men, located out of range of the cameras, how to communicate with the big spenders who were sitting in front of their home computers in their underwear. (In alternate accounts, Tate did this work himself.)

Romania. After operating out of London for a few years and, he says, making his first million dollars, Andrew Tate moved the Web cam business to Romania and acquired part interest in at least one casino. A local partner in the casino owned Romania’s premier mixed martial arts enterprise, so Andrew–and perhaps Tristan as well–took up doing the color commentary for these events.

And Tate became genuinely fond of Romania, often describing the countryside and its people as “beautiful.” He donated to the Christian Orthodox Church, established a canine shelter to get the stray dogs off the Bucharest streets, and rebuilt an orphanage.

Tate purchased and renovated a large residence in Bucharest, where until recently he lived with Tristan and a man referred to as “cousin Luc” (sometimes “Luke”). There are numerous videos of Tate training or sparring at the Romanian residence, including an extended series of Tate rather mercilessly teaching his smaller “cousin” to box.

The Romanian home included guest rooms, a gun collection and other weapons, a studio for podcasting, a swimming pool, and parking for dozens of luxury cars, many of them racing vehicles.

Tate says he has had training in various forms of driving, and he participates in road races in locations around the world. Among his vehicles are MacLarens, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and one very special orange-gold Bugatti. And no, Tristan doesn’t race, although he sometimes attends rallies with Andrew. He explains resignedly: “Someone needs to be there to pull him out of a burning wreck.” And there is no doubt that Tristan would do just that. No one can question the bond between Andrew And Tristan: it’s so obvious that you can feel it, even though you are watching video of people you have never seen in real life.

Wealth. How wealthy is Tate, and how has he acquired this wealth? There are wildly different estimates of Tate’s wealth on the Internet, going as high as seven hundred million dollars. There is no reason to believe that any online estimate is based on anything other than guesswork. However, his possessions, which include not only dozens of luxury cars, but also a collection of gaudy diamond wristwatches, as well as his constant travel by private jet, all suggest that Andrew Tate is a very wealthy man. As of December 2022, Tate was saying he was a billionaire.

Some of Tate’s businesses have unsavory aspects, but it is unlikely that any of them are illegal. Why? The enemies Tate has acquired as a result his successes would surely have had him incarcerated long ago if he were doing anything illegal. [Update: Global Ruling Elites are, as of his arrest on December 28, 2022, actively attempting to silence Tate and confiscate his wealth. The Romanians have taken all his assets in that wretched little country, but he apparently has even more to lose in other parts of the world.]

Andrew Tate has made millions from his online school and its related ventures and merchandising, and he operates a paid-membership men’s network called The War Room. He probably has made money from a variety of investments, and he is reputed to have profited on the Bitcoin and traditional currency markets. On a podcast in early autumn 2022, he casually mentioned having made “thirty or forty million dollars on the ruble.”

One thing is undisputed: Tate did not benefit from inherited wealth. He is highly intelligent, and he is an autodidact with limited formal education. He learned economics and business from the Internet, observation, and his own life experience.

Internet Influencing. The brothers evolved into Internet influencers as well as businessmen and soi-disant playboys, appearing as guests on numerous podcasts and generating their own video footage for Andrew’s vlogs, Tate Speech and Tate Confidential (both once on YouTube, now on Rumble). Tate’s message is geared for a young male audience, but he has attracted other followers as well.

Andrew’s online school, called Hustler’s University prior to his Internet banishment and now dubbed The Real World, teaches “modern” wealth-creation strategies for a modest monthly tuition fee. As of December 2022, Tate said about 160,000 students were enrolled.

Aging and physical appearance(s). Combating problematic hairlines inherited from their male parent, the brothers recently took action. Tristan had his hair redistributed. (In one video, you can watch Andrew removing the stitches. There is next to nothing these two deem unworthy of camera time, but it is often very amusing.) Following in his father’s footsteps, Andrew opted for a quick, non-surgical solution: shaving his head. The result is not only eye-catching, but sexy as hell. Tate does owe a debt to Yul Brynner.

As to dress, Tristan opts for bespoke suits. By contrast, formal wear for Andrew consists of skintight pants with skintight tees or unbuttoned designer shirts that expose the partial-chest tattoo he has had redesigned several times. Sunglasses make both of them look like Las Vegas mafioso, but Andrew’s shades, frequently worn indoors when the studio lighting is not under his own control, accommodate a medical condition resulting from kickboxing injuries (retinal detachment and subsequent surgery or surgeries).

Eye candy. Overall, Andrew wears as little as he can, to the delight of female fans of various ages and probably some guys as well. There are hundreds of contemporary videos of Andrew shirtless, and hundreds more of him sparring, despite the fact that he has not been a professional fighter for half a decade.

Top G can also be seen sauntering around the deck of a yacht or diving into his swimming pool. Bathing or boxing trunks reveal a Greek-sculpture-like torso. Tate’s body, particularly his awesome back, has Discus Thrower athletic lines rather than that bodybuilder look. [Think Dolph Lundgren rather than Arnold Schwarzenegger. And trust Cyclonejane here. She’s been an ardent student of male bodies for over six decades.]

This display of muscles should end abruptly when Tate’s newly acquired Muslim “brothers” explain to him that men, although they do not have to be upholstered with fabric like lowly women, they do have to dress modestly. Covering his beautiful body and growing one of those grungy Islamic beards should put an end to Tate’s “eye candy” days.

Tristan. For most metrics or enterprises, Andrew outperforms and overshadows his brother, although there is potential for Andrew’s conversion to destroy this seeming natural law. Despite rumors, Tristan seems to have remained or become a Christian. He was building a new house in Romania at the time of his arrest.

Tristan is a couple inches taller than Andrew and, although he is a bit heavier than his brother, he is just as seriously muscular. However, unlike Andrew, Tristan is not the least bit sexy.

To be fair, Tristan does have a wonderful quick wit and, quite obviously, reads a great deal. You can tell that from his speech. If anything, Tristan is even more articulate than his brother, and his sentence structure and vocabulary attest to his reading a range of fiction and nonfiction.

Dubai. Recently, Tate converted to Islam and moved to Dubai, where he owns property. He has announced plans to move the cars to Dubai and to construct a new broadcast studio there. Although he has not, to Cyclonejane’s knowledge, publicly stated that he has become a citizen in that emirate, it would seem likely that he already has or is in the process of achieving this status. He appears to have the requisite wealth and property.

Tate’s conversion, combined with Dubai citizenship, would allow him to openly practice polygyny there. While Tate has in the past said he didn’t approve of marriage, stating that he doesn’t think a government has any business telling him “where to put [his] dick,” he is hypocritical enough to indulge in marriage if it accommodates his misogyny.

No one seems to know if Andrew Tate was ever married or exactly how many children he has sired, although he has put the number of offspring anywhere from four to a dozen, the latter number floated most recently. However, Tate has also recently stated that he purposefully varies the number of offspring each time he states it. Yul Brynner did with the same thing with his birthplace. The two have much in common, including interesting fathers, beautiful physiques, and reputations as lovers.

Tate may be childless, and he may find women physically repulsive and actually be a homosexual, but he has created a mystique about his sexuality that is dogma among his fans: Top G, everyone knows, is fiercely heterosexual, has been sexually active since the age of fifteen, and has a headcount of 600-700. [For old people unfamiliar with the term, a headcount is the number of discrete sex partners, not the total number of sexual events. Do we all remember the NBA star who boasted of screwing one thousand women and later acknowledged that “not one of them wanted to stay around”? As an update to this paragraph, video of Tate with a daughter has appeared, and some believe that a video of Andrew on his knees, play-boxing with a young boy, may be a father-son moment.]

American origins. The Tate siblings were born in the United States of an African American father and an English mother. Andrew was born Emory Andrew Tate III in Washington DC, sometime in December 1986 (sources vary regarding the specific day of the month). His father, called Emory, was in the US Army or Air Force (sources vary) at the time of Andrew’s birth.

A few years later, Emory appears to have moved to the CIA, simultaneously become an agent and an itinerant chess hustler, playing tournaments, teaching chess, doing chess demonstrations, and gambling on the outcome of his matches. Chess tournaments were populated with Russians, and Emory learned that language in a matter of weeks.* A few video clips of Emory Tate playing or instructing students of chess can be found online.

Eileen Tate gave birth to Andrew and his brother Tristan in quick succession. It is difficult to tell the boys apart in some of the few available family photos. While the boys were still quite young, Eileen gave birth to her third child, a girl named Janine.

For the decade before Emory divorced Eileen, the Tates lived mostly in the greater Chicago area, often across the state line in Indiana. Whatever Emory Tate made from his official source of income and his gambling, little of it was spent on his family, as they remained poor. Emory was not in the home on a regular basis. Andrew loves to relate how once, when his father came back from an extended absence, Eileen questioned Emory about a photo of another woman she had found among his possessions. According to Andrew, it took Emory only forty-two minutes to abandon the family again, explaining to his elder son that it was Eileen’s fault for annoying him.

England. When Andrew was roughly ten years old, Emory divorced Eileen, and because Emory did not choose to support the family, Eileen took her children back to her hometown of Luton, widely recognized as the worst town in England by almost any measurement. Her hometown was ugly and crime-ridden, but she hoped for support from her family, and she knew that in England, she could qualify for government assistance with housing and other necessities.

According to Tristan, the first address Eileen and her children had in England was a homeless shelter. His maternal grandmother, he says, was a racist who told her daughter that she could not bring those “n-word” children into her house. One of Eileen’s brothers, who either owned or managed a fish shop, did ultimately give Andrew his first job, carrying heavy trays of ice and fish, at an early age.

Speaking to Tucker Carlson, Andrew asserted that he had in many interviews explained that his mother was one of his “heroes,” but so far, this writer has been unable to locate any of these. He does speak often of providing financial support for his mother, saying it was the first thing he did when he became wealthy. She had been working many years as a “dinner lady,” mainly washing dishes, and he was delighted to tell her he was “retiring” her with a generous monthly allowance.

A note on Janine and Eileen. Tate’s sister is an attorney working in commercial law in the United States. In a video clip, an old friend of Emory Tate claims that Janine held a black belt in karate. There are pictures of her online as an exceptionally beautiful young woman. Apparently, she and her brothers have not spoken to each other in years.

For a while, Tate seemed to prefer avoiding comment on his sister, but more recently he has taken to demeaning her as he does with most women. It must be annoying, if not stressful, for a still-young professional to go to her workplace knowing that her colleagues and the office staff have likely heard or read online accounts of her brother’s most recent antics or comments.

Of the negative things to be said about Andrew Tate, his gratuitous ugly comments about his mother and sister are among the most disgusting. After his conversion, Tate did an interview in which he said he did not talk on the phone with his mother much because she was “just an old woman.” The comments are spiteful, and they cannot be attributed to attempts at humor or any other benign motive.

Tristan, however, gives Eileen a great deal of respect despite routinely criticizing his sister. In a kind and thoughtful statement about Eileen, whom he describes as “the backbone of our family,” he mentions that he had karate lessons every Sunday as a child, so it is possible that Janine as well as the boys had early karate instruction. Tristan states emphatically that Eileen was the parent most responsible for his success in kickboxing. His loving remarks, refreshing in their contrast to Andrew’s harsh statements about their mother, may still be available online.

Achievements outside business. As a five-year-old, Tate won the Indiana state chess championship for those aged sixteen and under. In the final match, he beat a sixteen-year-old, who cried when he lost.

Tate has said his IQ (148) was tested when he was a child, and he was skipped through several grades in school after taking a series of achievement tests. This may be true: there is much that attests to his intelligence, and it was common in many states in the US to put elementary students on a fast track as long as the child was well behaved and not unusually small for his or her age. Tate says that he usually did well academically despite not particularly liking school. He has also stated that when offered a scholarship to study business at an English university, he declined the funding in order to get on with real life, but that seems less likely.

Tate lost his chess mentor at the time of the divorce (because his father resided in the States), and somewhere in his late teens (most likely seventeen), he began serious training in the martial arts. Andrew says he had no means of transportation, so he picked a gym within running distance of his home. This turned out to be a three-mile run to Storm Gym, where Amir Subasic trained Andrew throughout a decade of competition and four (light heavyweight) kickboxing world titles. Tate has said that Amir became a second father to him, and they remain friends to this day. Subasic is a very interesting man, BTW.

Tate’s rep as a fighter. The usual YouTube jerks have made videos challenging Tate’s abilities and achievements as a fighter, but Joe Rogan’s assessment, which should outweigh most others, is that Tate was “a legit world champion kickboxer.”

As a pro, Andrew Tate was sponsored by the equipment manufacturer Sidekick. A few of their humorous promotional videos survive, one of which displays Tate holding a copy of Ring Magazine with himself on the cover. (Don’t know if it is genuine.) There are also a number of Tate’s fights available on YouTube, a few of which include brief post-fight interviews. A television segment exploring his status as a top martial arts fighter can also be found. Tate’s overall record suggests that he had at least eighty professional fights, mostly kickboxing, a few MMA. He won all but nine, and he had at least one string of sixteen straight knockouts. He was the real deal in the ring.

Cyclonejane
December 2022

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* BTW, Yul Brynner’s father spoke at least thirteen or fourteen languages.