Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read

Author:Bridget Read [Read, Bridget]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2025-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

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Herbalife, the nutrition company from Los Angeles, was founded in 1980, one year after the Amway decision. It was the brainchild of a man named Mark Hughes, a charming showman with a rough background. He claimed he grew up in a poor neighborhood of LA County, mostly with his grandparents. His mother’s fate inspired his business: Plagued by being overweight, she took prescription drugs to curb her appetite, became addicted to sleeping pills she took to counteract them, and eventually died of an overdose when Hughes was a child. These details were later revealed to be amplified for dramatic effect. Hughes had a relatively middle-class upbringing; his mother didn’t have a weight problem, Hughes’s father told the Los Angeles Times, and, according to him, she overdosed on painkillers.

It was true that Hughes’s mother’s death had set him on a dark path, during which he spent years at CEDU, a home for troubled youth started by a former sponsor at Synanon. Synanon was a Santa Monica addiction center that became notorious for a confrontational type of large-group awareness training called “attack therapy,” not unlike William Penn Patrick’s Leadership Dynamics Institute. Hughes was an awkward though handsome teenager and discovered a talent for schmoozing. He was a natural-born salesman, everyone who knew him said. He once persuaded then–Governor Ronald Reagan to donate $500 to his school during a trip to the state capital.

After CEDU, Hughes was taught the Plan by some of the pyramid industry’s best and brightest. In 1979, he joined a multilevel company in Los Angeles called Golden Youth, started by Larry Huff, a former Holiday Magic and Bestline promoter who had been permanently banned by the State of California from operating a chain-selling scheme since 1976. Hughes brought on Larry Thompson, one of Huff’s protégés, to start his own company, perfectly timed for the rise of fad dieting: Herbalife, which promised ten pounds of weight loss in thirty days with its supplements.

Eventually, Thompson and Hughes also brought in Jim Rohn, an evangelical preacher and former Nutri-Bio Canada VP who had run Opportunity Meetings at Bestline with Huff. (Rohn, too, had been banned from participating in chain selling in California after Bestline.) Rohn had continued building his name on the MLM-adjacent positive thinking circuit, giving success talks and selling his own program called “Adventures in Achievement.” He was eventually dubbed Herbalife’s “International Business Philosopher.”

One of Rohn’s protégés was a young high school dropout named Anthony “Tony” Robbins, who attended one of Rohn’s success seminars, then started working for him in the early 1980s. Robbins combined Rohn’s techniques with a process called Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP, a pseudoscientific method that mixes hypnotism, self-help, and psychology, into his own brand of motivation coaching. Robbins would become one of the wealthiest self-help gurus of all time. Like his mentor, he initially packaged his seminars as a franchise opportunity, selling “exclusive” rights to distribute his videotapes for $16,000. In 1991, Robbins was sued by multiple franchisees and accused of running a pyramid scheme.

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