The Netflix documentary Untold: The Liver King tells the story of Brian Johnson, the fitness influencer better known as the Liver King, who resorted to fraud to build a business empire with a reported annual income of $100m.
Johnson has built a substantial online following (2.3m followers on Instagram, 6.1m on TikTok) preaching 'ancestral living', ie rejecting modern comforts, eating whole foods and doing vigorous workouts.
Whole foods may be understating things in Johnson's case: a lot of his online content consists of him eating raw animal parts, including liver of course, but also testicles.
The documentary features bizarre scenes of Johnson, his wife and their sons killing a bull together before eating it raw. The boys, Rad "Ical" Johnson and Stryker "the Barbarian" Johnson, also eat 15 raw eggs per day.
Speaking about the woman from child protection services who pays regular visits to the family's home, Johnson boasts, “She’s like: ‘Why am I here? These kids are awesome'."
The Texan trades on his alarmingly muscular physique, which he admitted in 2022 to maintaining with $11,000 worth of steroids and human growth hormone per month, but he continues to post workout videos and other content.
Johnson's hypocrisy first came to light in leaked emails detailing his blood tests and current steroid and growth-hormone dosages that featured in a YouTube video posted by Derek Munro, a fellow bodybuilding influencer.
In a subsequent confession video, Johnson said: "Yes I've done steroids, and yes I am on steroids, monitored and managed by a trained hormone clinician.
"Liver King the public figure was an experiment to spread the message to bring awareness to the 4,000 people a day who kill themselves, the 80,000 people a day that try to kill themselves.
"Our people are hurting at record rates with depression, autoimmune, anxiety, infertility, low ambition in life.
"Our young men are hurting, feeling lost, weak and submissive, so I made it my job to model, teach and preach a simple, elegant solution called ancestral living, then nine ancestral tenants, so our people no longer have to suffer, so we can collectively express our highest and most dominant form."
Soon after Johnson's steroid abuse came to light, customers of his Ancestral Supplements, which Johnson claimed had sales of $100m per year, filed a $25m lawsuit against him for fraud.
In 2023, Johnson claimed that his net worth was $310m, but MoneyMade estimates it at closer to $12m based on public information, and puts Ancestral Supplements annual revenues at $1m to $10m, with profits of $380,000 to $3m.
The site noted his stakes in four supplement brands, including Heart and Soil ($5m revenue), The Fittest ($5m), and Medicine Man ($1m), but he also claims to have 10-12 projects that aren't public.
"With about 175,000 unique monthly visitors, an estimated average order of $80 (the cost of two supplements), and 2% conversion rate (a conservative estimate), the yearly revenue is around $3m to $4m just from the website.
"Orders from Amazon could bring in an additional $24m in annual revenue," MoneyMade said of Ancestral Supplements.
Additionally, Johnson owns a 8,300 sq. ft. Spanish-style mansion in Austin that is likely worth at least $4m as well as the nearby 'Liver Ranch' ($1m), which has two houses, a garage, a pool and grazing land for animals.
(Pic: Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)
