Back in the late 80s and early 90s, if you did a fair amount of late-night television channel surfing, there’s a good chance you remember Tom Vu.
A South Vietnamese immigrant who says he came to the United States without a cent in his pocket, Vu became an television-infomercial icon. He amassed a fortune through real estate dealings, and purchased an extraordinary amount of television air-time to promote his “get rich quick” seminars that, according to him, would teach others the tricks of the trade… and make them wealthy too.
What people remember mostly about those infomercials, was… well, let’s let John Daly explain (because he was apparently a big fan):
Note from John:
For childhood couch potatoes of a certain age (roughly my age), real-estate mogul Tom Vu was not just a pop-culture icon, but a pop-culture legend. I remember my brother and I, many a night, laughing hysterically at his over-the-top infomercials.
It wasn’t just the cartoonish flaunting of his wealth (like surrounding himself with bikini-clad women on a yacht, showing off his sprawling mansion, and cruising around in a Rolls-Royce)…
It was also his sharp rhetoric. In broken English, he cast his critics (and basically anyone who doubted him) as cowardly “losers” who “deserve to be broke.”
(Having just typed all that, it’s hard to miss the parallels to someone else).
I also got a kick out of supposed students of Vu’s, who appeared in the infomercials to testify to their teacher’s wisdom. One such fellow seemed inexplicably (and thus amusingly) angry while talking about the big money he was making under Vu’s guidance.
I spoke to Tom Vu in January of 1992, for a 48 Hours piece on him. The segment included conversations with seminar attendees who felt that Vu ripped them off.
Interestingly, Vu later retired from the real-estate market to become a professional gambler in Las Vegas… where he, again, made a lot of money.
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