It was the summer of 2023, and Matt Bergwall, a skinny 21-year-old University of Miami student, was lounging in an infinity pool in Dubai. Beside him was his girlfriend, a blonde Zeta Tau Alpha. The silver Cuban link chain on his wrist glistened as he held his phone high to snap a selfie, the city’s artificial palm-shaped islands splayed out along the horizon beneath them. Over the next few days, they swam in the pool and posed on their hotel balcony, posting a steady stream of pictures to Instagram. In one, he leans back on the edge of the pool, finger to the sky. “Eventful finals week,” he captioned it.

None of Bergwall’s friends at school had a firm grasp of how the sophomore — a self-styled fintech whiz, Marc Andreessen with a zoomer perm — had money for the Tesla he drove or the Gucci he wore or, for that matter, the room in Dubai. But who could care when Bergwall was ordering everyone Ubers and paying for tables at nightclubs and pitching in for yachts on Biscayne Bay? When he had the ear of venture capitalists at networking events in Brickell, Miami’s finance district? Okay, yes, his life had seemingly been enhanced exponentially, improbably, over the past year and a half — but wasn’t everything sort of improbable at UMiami? Wasn’t this the very place where Alix Earle had, by the end of her junior year, gained millions of followers for her “Get Ready With Me” videos? Where fraternity parking lots were filled with Lamborghinis and pledge classes with the children of billionaires who drove them?

One day several months later, Bergwall’s friends were hanging out on campus when the question they weren’t asking was accidentally answered via a text from a young woman’s father. A UMiami student had been charged with orchestrating a cyberscam that allegedly cost retailers millions of dollars, he wrote her, and was facing up to 45 years in prison. “We looked at each other and were like, ‘Oh my gosh, what if it’s Matt?’” she told me. “And then we opened the article and it actually was.”

Bergwall grew up in Darien, Connecticut, in a house not far from the leafy Woodland Park Nature Preserve. His father was a successful real-estate executive and his mother a VP of training and development at Chase. He was a quiet, smart child who was constantly on his computer. In middle school, that meant hours and hours sucked into the freewheeling virtual world of Minecraft.

Like any kid born after 2000, and especially a kid who enjoyed building custom gaming servers for his friends in his spare time, Bergwall spent his teen years observing the rise of a specific kind of demigod — from Satoshi Nakamoto to the market-moving mobs of r/WallStreetBets to Sam Bankman-Fried, the world seemed to belong to whoever could articulate the most absurd vision of how to finance it. Low interest rates fueled precipitous valuations, minting fortunes on laughable balance sheets. Crypto alchemy transmuted monkey NFTs into mansions. Bergwall’s own entrepreneurial streak first manifested in the hallways of Darien High, where former classmates say he sold vapes, an easy hustle at a time when school bathrooms were overflowing with kids hitting their mango-flavored Juuls between classes. On Instagram, he carved out a sideline buying accounts, growing their followings artificially, and selling them online. He soon moved on to freelance software engineering, building a website for an online community of Grand Theft Auto players. Bergwall’s friends were impressed but a little unnerved by how he used his skill for software engineering. Former classmates said he would install files on school computers that would crash them, that he’d hack into security cameras; there were rumors that he had changed his friends’ grades. When it started to seem like he might get in trouble for selling his peers access to discounted Spotify Premium accounts, his friends said, they “were able to convince him, like, ‘Hey, man, this probably isn’t the hill to die on,’” one told me. That friend said that when Bergwall boasted about his exploits, he tended to focus less on the money and more on “how cool it was that he was doing something vigilante.” Of course, the money was cool too. When Bergwall hosted a party, he would often buy alcohol for everyone. Per the friend, “It was clearly all coming from his own pocket.”

His senior year, he got a 40-hour-a-week job at Mirador, a financial-services company in town, at which he’d interned the summer before. This meant that in addition to his regular high-school course load, saxophone practice, and running sound for the school auditorium, he was spending his nights and weekends consulting on genuinely professional software projects. He described the role on LinkedIn as “truly a full stack project, managing design, development, and project management.”

Given his résumé, some of his friends expected him to go to an Ivy. Instead, he enrolled at UMiami, where he planned to double major in computer science and management. But in December 2019, halfway through Bergwall’s senior year, his father died of cancer. Devastated — “I do not know how I will move on from this. Right now I feel like I will never move on,” he wrote on Instagram — Bergwall decided to take a gap year and focus on making more money. He stayed on at Mirador and added a second job at a Boston-based crypto start-up called Flipside. In October 2020, he went on a podcast called Dharma Unfiltered, hosted by UMiami student Reed Kastner-Lang. Bergwall had yet to matriculate; he and Kastner-Lang found each other in a Snapchat group for incoming freshmen with an interest in entrepreneurship. “You’ve tasted a lot of different things within the computer-science industry,” Kastner-Lang said to Bergwall. “Down the road, what do you see yourself doing?” Bergwall explained that, actually, his thinking had shifted lately. He once dreamed of working as a software engineer at Google. Now, “I don’t want to be a slave for Google,” he said. “I want to build something. I want to run something.” When his gap year ended, he quit Mirador, reduced his hours at Flipside, and moved to Miami to begin in-person classes in the spring of 2021.

By the time he arrived, Miami had already taken its place as a haven for a particular flavor of techno-optimist capitalist: libertarians, crypto bulls, and OnlyFans agencies. The city promised a launching pad for a gifted young software engineer to step off the traditional career track — the kind of thing expected in stuffy, old-money Darien — into a lifestyle on the bleeding edge........

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