On December 11, Johnson finally released his public statement, a 16-minute video to YouTube entitled “My Ex-Fiancée Sued Me for $9,000,000” in which he cast himself as a victim of a #MeToo extortion scheme. (The $9 million referred to a letter that Southern’s earlier lawyers, working on contingency, sent to Johnson in April 2021, seeking a settlement to avoid a public legal battle.) “Their strategy was to inflict maximum pain and suffering on me so that I would pay up privately,” he said. “They miscalculated my tenaciousness and resolve, and their strategy backfired, inflicting collateral damage upon themselves.” He noted that he plans to put the money that Southern is paying for his legal fees into a trust that she can access exclusively for her future medical needs.

But people close to Southern view the case and its outcome differently. Anna-Marie Wascher, one of her closest friends, feels Johnson’s recent posts about the case’s resolution are “outlandish.” She told Vanity Fair, “This is not a he said/she said story. It’s one of control, power, and the idolization of false personas powered by money and/or social media—not by authenticity, compassion, or a positive contribution to society.”

Before the lawsuit, before the cancer, before crossing paths with Johnson, before anyone knew what a digital creator was, Taryn Southern was one. In the aughts, she became known for her YouTube music video parodies in the style of “Weird Al” Yankovic and two channels with half a million subscribers. Charismatic, pretty, and blessed with a strong singing voice—powerful enough to propel her to the American Idol semifinals when she was a teen—Southern moved to Los Angeles after attending the University of Miami on an academic scholarship, graduating magna cum laude with a double BA in anthropology and mixed media journalism. As her videos went viral, her reputation as a millennial marketing whiz at the nexus of entertainment and technology grew. She set up a one-woman consulting company, Happy Cat Media, and was hired by companies ranging from Ford to Marriott that wanted to reach a young and very online audience. She was invited to speak at prestigious tech conferences, hosted the red carpet at the Golden Globes, and even dabbled in acting, with guest roles on popular shows like New Girl. There were segments she produced for Today, a late-night talk show on the Discovery Channel where she worked as a correspondent, and a mention in a 2016 Vanity Fair article about rising YouTube and Vine stars.

Southern’s YouTube content attracted the attention of Johnson, who, according to Southern’s friends, slid into her Facebook messages in June 2016 and asked her out. At the time, Johnson was a divorced dad who was embracing his new identity as a wealthy tech prophet after breaking away from Mormonism and emerging from a decade-long bout with depression. “I tried to remake myself as—I don’t want to say from scratch because that’s too far of an overstatement—but I wanted to remake myself as far as I could reach,” he tells Vanity Fair.

Money was scarce in the Johnson household as he was growing up in Springville, Utah. His father, a lawyer who was disbarred in 1992, was an addict and separated from Johnson’s mother, a substitute teacher, when Johnson was three. (In an August interview on the Diary of a CEO podcast, Johnson spoke about how close he and his father have become in adulthood, growing emotional while recounting how random people on the internet made comments about his father after the news of the three-way plasma swap broke.)

Johnson delayed college to be a Mormon missionary in Ecuador for two years. The experience of seeing extreme poverty up close inspired him to want to “make an enormous amount of money by the age of 30 and then figure out a way to uplevel humanity,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, in July.

When he returned from Ecuador, he enrolled in college at Brigham Young University and parlayed a cell phone sales job into his first successful entrepreneurial venture: hiring college students to sell cell phone service for him. Although the company helped cover his tuition, “it was not going to make me enough money to retire by 30, so I had to find something bigger,” he told Tim Ferriss on a 2015 episode of his eponymous podcast. (The episode was called “The Rags-to-Riches Philosopher.”) Johnson’s next move was starting a VoIP company that went out of business, after which he tried his hand in a real estate development venture that also failed. By 2006, he had moved to Chicago to get his executive MBA at the Booth School of Business, where one of his favorite thinkers, Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker, taught. Deeply indebted and with a family to support, he took a job selling credit card processing services to retailers door-to-door. “The requirement was like: If you could fog a mirror, you could work for these guys,” he told Ferriss.

Before long, Johnson was the company’s number one salesperson, and he had a new idea to disrupt the fragmented, opaque credit card processing business. He called it Braintree, after the hometown of one of his heroes, John Adams, and entered it in a business school competition, which he won. Braintree grew via bootstrapping as companies ranging from Github to Airbnb became clients until 2011, when the company, with about 40 employees and a few million dollars in annual revenue, took on a $34 million Series A investment from the prestigious venture firm Accel Partners. Johnson took a multimillion-dollar payout and kept a stake in the business. A few months later, Braintree formally announced that Johnson would be replaced as CEO by Bill Ready, who had been Accel’s executive in residence. (Ready is now the CEO of Pinterest.) In 2013, when the company was sold, Johnson along with his two brothers—one served as Braintree’s CFO and the other was on the sales team—and his sister, an accountant for the company, all exited.

In interviews, Johnson takes credit for the sale of Braintree. And certainly he deserves credit for noticing a gap in the market for transparent payments processing, growing a loyal team, and building up a book of business that made it attractive enough for Accel Partners to invest in. But it was Ready who orchestrated Braintree’s $26.2 million acquisition of Venmo in 2012. At some point, there was a significant business disagreement, according to multiple sources, and in the months before Braintree was acquired by PayPal, Johnson was barred from entering the company’s headquarters. Johnson says “that disagreement” led the CEO to “taking an action that I disagreed with,” but that Johnson “chose not to make a big deal about it because it was in the best interest of the company that we have the discussion with eBay,” which at the time owned PayPal. In 2013, Braintree was sold to PayPal for approximately $800 million in cash, of which Johnson says he netted close to $400 million. Bill Ready and PayPal president David Marcus were photographed at the Nasdaq on the day the deal was announced. Johnson wasn’t mentioned in the press release.

Part of Johnson’s self-mythology, which he speaks about often, is how the daily grind of entrepreneurship took its toll on his mental and physical health. “I had been [for] 14 years under the crushing pressure of building multiple companies. I was in a bad relationship. I was trying to leave my born-into religion. I wasn’t sleeping. I was 50 pounds overweight. I had been depressed for 10 years. And so I was not in tip-top shape,” he tells me. When a friend took him to a Brooklyn warehouse party to cheer him up after selling Braintree, he remembers feeling so liberated that he danced for seven hours straight. “When the music stopped in the morning, I was disappointed because I wanted to dance more,” he says, adding that he was not under the influence of any drugs at the time.

He finally was feeling that sense of release that comes with never having to worry about money again. His next step was the “upleveling humanity” phase of his life plan, which began with the allocation of $100 million of his own money in an investment fund, called the OS Fund, with the mission to back ideas that seem impossible: “I want to get a company from ‘crazy’ to ‘viable,’?” Johnson told Fortune magazine in 2014. His most successful bet, he says, was an early investment in Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based biotech company that was valued at $15 billion when it went public in 2021. “His interest has been getting in at the ground level, seeing things that others don’t see, and being able to absorb risk to help these fundamental technologies evolve,” says Jason Kakoyiannis, a serial biotech founder, adviser to Ginkgo Bioworks, and friend of Johnson’s.

After launching OS, Johnson backed his own passion project, Kernel, which initially planned to develop computer-brain interfaces similar to Elon Musk’s Neuralink but has since pivoted to noninvasive technologies.

Johnson was living in Los Angeles and serving as chief executive of Kernel when he first messaged Southern on Facebook to ask her out. What was supposed to be a quick drink at an LA restaurant turned into hours of deep conversation, during which Johnson told her that he “loved the way her brain worked” and that he felt “an intense desire to take care of her,” according to her lawsuit. “I remember [Taryn] saying she felt like she connected with him in an intellectual way. For someone as sharp as her, that was difficult to come by,” recalls a friend who spoke to Southern right after the date. (Like many people interviewed for this story, she didn’t want to be named because she fears retribution from Johnson.) Within weeks, Johnson introduced Southern to his three children, who were visiting Los Angeles. For Southern’s 30th birthday, less than a month after they met, Johnson took her and three of her friends on his jet to Lake Tahoe, where they rented a house and went waterskiing. “He love-bombed the absolute shit out of her,” recalls Southern’s friend Bella Acton, who was at the birthday event. “I don’t think ‘love-bombing’ even does justice to just how full-on he was: You’d be sitting there talking to Taryn and he’d be like, kissing her face, and you’re thinking, Could you maybe stop doing that?”