Does Leroy Fodor aspire to be the next John Fitzpatrick?:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/john-fitzpatricks-exascale-power-co-of-portland-or-is-scam-1157231PORTLAND, ORE.
The self-styled supercomputer visionary who secretly pledged $100 million to Portland State University has been spinning grandiose tales of success to public officials, industry insiders and prospective investors for two decades.
But an analysis of public documents left in John Michael Fitzpatrick's wake, from Boardman to Washington, D.C., turns up no evidence of the wealth he promised to bequeath.
What it does show is a high-tech mirage, preceded by a string of unsuccessful forays into politics, free-speech advocacy, offshore finance, consulting, insurance and a check-cashing business.
That all should have been quickly evident to Portland State and a number of other public and private institutions hooked, at least temporarily, by Fitzpatrick's tales over the years. Yet he appears to have played them all almost perfectly, recognizing needs and promising to fulfill them.
Fitzpatrick, 51, offered Portland State a philanthropic dream when he approached the school's fundraising arm earlier this month: $100 million in unrestricted funds that would nearly double the university's paltry endowment while underwriting a host of immediate program needs. At his insistence, university officials scheduled an August 18 press conference to announce the anonymous gift. Then they invited the governor and Portland's mayor to help celebrate the windfall.
The money never came.
In fact, the man behind Portland State's nine-figure golden egg had filed for bankruptcy just a few years earlier, listing $0 in assets.
"Frankly, I think he's leading a lot of people down the path that he has no ability to fulfill," said Myrna Fitzpatrick, his stepmother, who says she's had very little contact with him in the last three decades.
John Fitzpatrick still insists he's sitting on an enormous fortune and could make good on his pledge if Portland State would take his calls. He says non-disclosure agreements prevent him from providing a single business reference or document that would vouch for his billions.
"Portland is going to have a great opportunity for the university and the local economy," he said. "I can't even transfer them the money."
Portland State is not the first organization to buy into Fitzpatrick's vision. After a long absence from Oregon, he publicly resurfaced in Portland in 2013 with a plan to build a supercomputer with the processing power of the human brain.
He approached the Port of Morrow in early 2014 with a proposal to locate the $50 billion machine at the port's industrial park outside Boardman. Port officials were intrigued by the prospect, and soon signed a letter of intent, said Gary Neal, the port's general manager.
Before Neal knew it, he said, Fitzpatrick's company had issued a press release touting plans for the world's first exascale computer. The computer would be capable of one billion billion calculations per second and require 1,000 megawatts of electricity to run — slightly less than the entire capacity of the Bonneville Dam.
Engineers at Intel also were intrigued, as Fitzpatrick was planning to generate the behemoth's massive computational power using exclusively Intel processors.
Neal said he soon felt uncertain. "I did some follow up on the company, and it looked like it was questionable at best. It was weird, a very strange deal, and I didn't see any strength behind it."
That deal fell apart, but Fitzpatrick moved quickly to transfer the project to Oklahoma. On April 1, 2014, he filed a notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission that his company, Exascale Power Co. was planning to sell $50 billion in short-term bonds to fund the buildout.
The proposed borrowing was three times more than Facebook raised in its 2012 initial public offering. And the one-page notice indicated that Exascale, with no revenues, had already sold $500 million in securities. There is no public record that such a sale ever took place.
Three weeks later, Fitzpatrick unveiled even bigger plans, filing a preliminary notice with regulators that Exascale intended to take over Intel, Oregon's largest private employer, currently valued at more than $130 billion.
Fitzpatrick's plan was to exchange "some shares of Exascale Power Co... for all of Intel Corporation." He explained in an accompanying letter to Intel Chairman Andy Bryant that there was "more of an opportunity to grow my business in large scale data center development with ownership and controlling interest in Intel Corp."
An Intel spokeswoman said the company had no comment.
Fitzpatrick did approach economic development officials at an industrial park east of Tulsa, Oklahoma, with his plans to build a supercomputer that would generate $13 billion a year in operating profits.
"Yeah, that never happened," said a receptionist at the MidAmerica Industrial Park in Pryor Creek.
Rich Brueckner, president of the Portland-based industry publication InsideHPC, said Fitzpatrick is widely viewed with skepticism.
"He's basically saying he can create an exascale-level machine with cloud computing for a fraction of what it would cost," Brueckner said. "Anyone in tech would tell you this is not possible."
Indeed, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers predicts the first practical exascale computer won't be built until 2023.
Fitzpatrick's career is filled with odd ventures: a failed Republican bid for U.S. Senate in 1998; a free-speech campaign in which he ran graphic pornographic videos on Portland's public access channel.
His widowed stepmother said she and her husband weren't sure Fitzpatrick has ever held a traditional job.
Yet in 2002, a tech journal published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology described him as a Cayman Islands hedge fund manager looking to build the world's largest supercomputer, one that could predict future market movements.
Thomas Sterling, a well-known computer scientist who teaches at Indiana University, was briefly a board member of that company, JJX Capital. He said Fitzpatrick was a visionary who could make connections that others could not see.
But, Sterling added, there's a large gap between originating an idea and fulfilling it. A 2004 Bloomberg News story noted that JJX had failed.
Fitzpatrick registered three businesses in Ohio, where he lived in the mid-2000s. They included a consulting firm in Columbus and another outfit called Bob's Check Cashing Service. In 2009, he became a licensed insurance agent selling casualty, life and property coverage in Dublin, a city of 41,000 near Columbus.
Two years later, he surfaced in Washington, D.C., where he tried to reorganize his business and personal debts under Chapter 11, taking the unusual step of representing himself. He initially listed zero assets and $95,000 in debt - all owed to the landlord of a $7,000-monthly space near George Washington University. Eventually, he disclosed a total of $160,000 in debts.
Early filings in the bankruptcy case list his only income as a $450 monthly disability check. Months of back and forth ended after Fitzpatrick failed to file required reports or pay fees in the proceeding, and the judge dismissed the case.
Fitzpatrick said he has suffered serious health problems, including a heart attack and a stroke as the bankruptcy case played out. He said doctors warned him he might die, though two years of bed rest helped him recuperate.
Although the bankruptcy was stressful, Fitzpatrick said it was a strategic move. He hoped to use a little known provision in the bankruptcy code to fast track the initial public offering of a software company he planned to buy. The purchase price was $5 million, he said, but based on its income and sales projections, the company would net as much as $340 million in a sale.
Fitzpatrick acknowledged the deal never happened because the bankruptcy court didn't understand his proposal.
"If you ever have time and want to make a couple hundred million, that's how to do it," he said.