how to make £1 million in 90 days

Butler and the shed he propelled to culinary fame

OOBAHS/INSTAGRAM

It was a glorious joke. As television stations all over the world clamoured to speak to him about it, Butler embarked upon another experiment in which he sent lookalikes to do his interviews. He hired a gorgeous model to fill in for him on an Indian television station. His brother Pete successfully passed himself off as Butler on an Australian breakfast show. “I don’t think I’m the same man I was,” Pete said, quite truthfully.

Butler then won an online journalism prize. Naturally, he hired a Norwegian actor to pretend to be him at the ceremony. “Tank you zo much for this award!” the Norwegian cried.

I watch the video just before I go to see Butler, a little anxiously. Will it be the real Oobah I meet or a lookalike?

Do people say, “Is this really you?” I ask, once we are seated.

“Yeah, I had that for a while,” he says.

Encouragingly, he does not sound at all Norwegian. He sounds like he is from the Midlands, which would be about right. I look over his face: the wide, doll-like features are there, all present and correct, the round cheekbones, the pale skin, the flaxen hair.

Butler says one of his favourite doppelgänger stunts involved the Welsh actor Tom Rhys Harries, “a mate of mine. I sent him on [the BBC show] Rip Off Britain as me.” The interview was filmed in his back garden, in front of the now famous shed.

“I watched the whole thing,” Butler says. “I lay shirtless on top of my shed.” He had a friend surreptitiously film him spying on the BBC camera crew. I’m not sure why he needed to be shirtless, though it does add an exuberant flourish to the proceedings. It is Butler, in the flesh.

Sadly, the BBC never ran the interview. He has since heard from a chap in the production team, who spotted that it was not him when they were going over the footage. “He said, ‘Everyone in the room was going, “Why would he do that?” ’ He was like, ‘No, trust me, this is exactly the kind of thing that this guy would do.’ ”

The lookalikes thing “was about, you know, replacing myself and optimising myself like you would a brand”, Butler says.

From Channel 4’s How I Made £1 Million in 90 Days. Butler’s “ethical sweatshop”, staffed by children who design a shirt, sells 100 of them at £100 each

CHANNEL 4

He’s rather like a conceptual artist: even when he looks like a half-naked man on a shed, he is aiming at something grander.

In a film he made for Channel 4 in 2023, he assailed Amazon with a variety of pranks designed to expose working conditions in the warehouse and even the rather dry subject of tax avoidance. Now, in London and here in New York, he has made a film about money.

“I read the Martin Amis book Money,” he says. It is about a British film-maker,a rising star, zipping between London and New York as he tries to get a film off the ground with a supposed money man named Fielding Goodney, who rolls around in a “six-door Autocrat, half a block long, with a zooty chauffeur”. He has a “rich million-dollar laugh, reluctant, like all the most loveable laughter”, the narrator says. “You would do almost anything to inspire it.”

Butler felt that it got to something about “the way they think of money here, the way they talk of money here. I was like, ‘I need to try to make a film about this.’ ”

He wanted to get in among the money men of New York, the financiers, the tech bros, the crypto sisters. “And then, obviously, I need something that I’m doing.”

The film is called How I Made £1 Million in 90 Days. It is like Challenge Anneka, if Anneka was just trying to get rich as quickly as possible. His first thought is to pull a stunt and use the attention to sell a limited-edition product. He organises an “ethical sweatshop”, staffed by children, who design a shirt. GQ magazine runs a story about the sweatshop, and he manages to sell 100 of the shirts, at £100 each. He also tries selling an online course on how to make money, which he promotes with a viral video of an art dealer who is persuaded to bid £500 for a stick from his brother’s garden.

Two million people watched it. Butler thought he was on to a winner. But after 24 hours, only a single person had paid to take his class. “It was obviously quite humiliating,” he says.

As he seeks financing, and other potential money-making ideas, he naturally heads for New York, to knock about with investors and entrepreneurs.

A lot of them are rather like him in the way that they think. “Yeah, a bit scarily close in some ways,” he says. One of the lessons he learnt from them is that “you just sort of repitch everything you do as a win”, he says. He does this while trying to convince investors to pay him $1 million (£750,000) for a 10 per cent share of his future earnings.

“The thing that we bumped up against with me, obviously, is that I’ve got a history of f***ery,” he says.

‘It’s easier to build the idea of value and sell it off than to genuinely make money’

People wonder if this is the real Oobah Butler. And is he really worth $1 million? Butler attempted to firm up his reputation by paying the Georgia outpost of Forbes magazine to run a profile of him that he had written himself, detailing his many tremendous successes. You can find it online. It suggests that his “ethical sweatshop” brand is preparing to open“its first flagship store in London”. It claims that his money-making course will soon be offered in “workshops in Lagos, Mumbai and Sao Paulo, targeting markets hungry for Butler’s unique brand of success”.

The other lesson he learns is that the idea that he is valuable could be more important than anything he had to sell. Once one investor had agreed to buy a stake in him for $1 million, it “legitimised” his worth in the eyes of others, he says. Even though he decides not to take the $1 million, he discovers that he is now eligible for a low-interest loan of up to $8 million.

If he had earned £1 million fair and square, “I’d have paid about £450,000 in tax on it,” he says. Whereas, “If I take a loan against my value, then I pay zero.” This is how titans of industry fund their enterprises, he says. “You know, it’s how Elon Musk bought Twitter… or when Larry Ellison buys anything.”

A waiter arrives as we are discussing Butler’s multimillion-dollar value. He orders an iced coffee and a double espresso. I order the same thing. It is one of those conversations where you need at least two strong coffees.

“It’s easier to build the idea of value and sell it off than to genuinely make money,” he says. “I think that was sort of evidenced by what ended up happening. It’s a broken part of the [system].”

He takes a sip of one of his coffees. “Everything is like that at the moment,” he says. “You’re probably better off not having sold any T-shirts and just having the idea that, at some point, you will sell some T-shirts.”

‘The only time I wasn’t called Oobah was at the job centre’

Butler is from Feckenham, a village 20 miles south of Birmingham. His mum was a nurse who then went to work doing administration at a funeral home; his father had an office job in an accounts department and also bought and sold vinyl records.

They had six children, all with quite common Christian names but Butler, from the time he was a baby, was always known by the nickname Oobah. The only time he was called anything else “was at the job centre”, he says. “Or with teachers who didn’t like me.” Eventually, he made Oobah his legal name.

Butler and several of his brothers were in a band together. “It was the thing that I did with my young life, basically up until I was 25,” he says. He did not go to university. It was their parents’ great hope that they would make a success of it, he says. As the band wound down, he began “writing clickbait music news for a website”.

He feels that the clickbait-y element was “really formative for what I do now”. His first more ambitious article, pitched to Vice magazine, “was a clickbait title that evolved into something larger”. The idea was to go door to door, like a Jehovah’s Witness, armed with CDs, to “find out if music is harder to sell than religion”.

“Offered a $1 million investment, he could now get an $8 million loan”

AARON RICHTER FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE

His early pieces were like little adventures. There was one about trying to take advantage of all-you-can-eat restaurant deals, by, for instance, spending an entire day in a Chinese buffet in Camberwell, south London. There was one about crashing Paris Fashion Week by pretending to be an Italian designer named Georgio Peviani. And then, of course, there was the fake restaurant.

Around the same time, his brown hair began to turn grey. He felt he was far too young for that.

“So I dyed it blond and then I started having success,” he says.

The new MrBeast

It was almost like a calling card. Martin Bell had his white suit; Butler had his platinum hair. So did his lookalikes. Perhaps this is why so many of them got away with it. Butler started a website where customers could “book an Oobah”, a doppelgänger. He made a film about a man sending a more attractive lookalike to a high-school reunion.

This led to an offer to co-present the UK version of the television show Catfish, about fake personas in online dating. Butler used the money to make a short film about Amazon, which Channel 4 then commissioned as a larger production: The Great Amazon Heist.

He has followed that up with a film about the housing crisis in Britain, in which he attempts to get a young couple onto the property ladder, and this film about trying to make £1 million. One of his mentors in that film describes him as “the new MrBeast”, after the famous YouTuber whose stunts have made him a fortune.

‘One second it’s wow, I’m gonna be a millionaire, and the next…’

I ask if he even made money from his film about making money.

“No, I’m down in the making of the film,” he says. It is partly because he has moved to New York where he now has a flat in Chinatown, in lower Manhattan. The rent is $2,700, “which I’m told is a good deal. But it’s the most I’ve ever spent on rent. It’s killing me, you know.”

He’s still getting used to the exhilaration and despondency the city can inspire, in turn, in the space of a minute or two. “It’s so up and down,” he says. He is only a few blocks from where David Bowie used to live. But when he got home recently from London he found his flat infested with cockroaches.

“It’s like the film. One second I’m like, wow, I’m gonna be a millionaire, and then the next second… It can really, truly make you feel like a piece of shit.”

I ask if he ever thinks about the $8 million he might have had.

“It pops up in my head a lot,” he says. The other day he noticed that it would be enough to buy the League Two football team MK Dons.

That would have been quite the stunt. Imagine he had emerged from all this as the proud owner of a League Two football team.

“Yeah, I was thinking about it,” he says. “I texted the broker from the bank and he was like, ‘Oh! We’ve not bought a football club before.’ And I just thought, ‘Bloody hell!’ ”

How I Made £1 Million in 90 Days is available to watch on channel4.com