16-Year-Old High School Dropout Is A Millionaire Living A Life You’d Only Dream Of

What were you doing when you were 16-years-old? Playing video games for 15 hours straight causing your eyes to be bloodshot and red like you were on a PCP bender? Beating your distended meat to Kaley Cuoco in 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter until your skin was blistered and raw? Well, Ben Pasternak isn’t like most 16-year-olds. He isn’t even like most adults. He is a goddamn millionaire.

The New York Post gives the impressive origin story of Pasternak, who now lives on his own in a studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen:

Six months ago, Pasternak was living in Sydney, Australia, with his parents, Anna and Mark, and younger siblings, Jake, 13, and Maya, 6. Now he’s a high-school dropout navigating a foreign city on his own, and he’s launching his own company, a social media marketplace for teens called Flogg, worldwide on Thursday.

Oh yeah, I remember my first company. Oh wait. No I don’t. Beer. I remember my first beer. Same difference.

When Pasternak was 15 he created the smartphone game called “Impossible Rush,” it has been downloaded more than a million times. The game’s success made tech giants like Google and Facebook take notice in the young prodigy (Yes that is a photo of Pasternak and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook above). At first, Ben’s parents weren’t sold on their son quitting school. “But after venture capitalists got interested and said they’d put down money, I was like, ‘I won’t get this opportunity again!’ He decided to drop out in the middle of the 10th grade in 2015 to work on his new venture, Flogg. Pasternak has raised nearly $2 million in initial funding for his eBay-meets-Instagram app.

But it’s not all fun and games and recreating scenes from the movie Big. The teen CEO works hectic 16-hour days building his company, which debuts today and promises to be “a fun, easy way to buy and sell with your friends and their friends.”

Pasternak even has employees, overseeing a staff of seven part-timers and a COO, who is 30-years-old, nearly double the age of his boss. Must be nice to have the bargaining power with your boss, “Hey, give me a raise and I’ll take you to see Hardcore Henry, which you can’t see by yourself because it’s rated R.”

While the young man is a whiz with entrepreneur, he hasn’t yet grown into all those pesky adult responsibilities.

“There’s so much stuff I’ve got to take care of, like dishes and washing clothes,” says Pasternak. “I always fall behind on my bills — [bill collectors] call me on the phone and they’re like, ‘You’ve got to pay this,’ but I keep forgetting. When I lived with my parents, I took so much stuff for granted.”

He can’t cook, but he is so busy that he often times forgets to eat, and when he does it’s mostly thin-crust pizza.

The worst part of Pasternak’s meteoric success is that it has come at such a young age, so he is not in charge of his money. He needs his parents to co-sign everything from his apartment lease to his bank account. Guess the Lambo and high-end escorts will have to wait two years.

“I left my debit card in a cab the other day, and Chase won’t give me another one without my parents’ approval,” the teen phenom states. “So as of right now I have access to $0.”

But he’s just like any other teenager who has their own NYC apartment, an ultra successful app and launching their own company. He rides a hoverboard and rocks Yeezy sneakers. “I’m just like any other teenager,” he says. “I like all the same stuff.”

Excuse me why I go wallow in disappointment and shame in my lack of accomplishments.

[NYPost]