Tumblr founder David Karp -- shown here opening the Nasdaq exchange in Times Square on July 11, 2013 -- seems to have a bit too much free time on his hands these days.
After selling his One Direction fan fiction platform to Yahoo! for a whopping $1.1 billion this spring, Tumblr founder David Karp netted a rumored $275 million from his 25 percent stake in the company. Though he’s still technically the CEO of Tumblr, with no venture capitalists pressuring him to make good on their investments, Karp appears to have morphed into a sad, listless rich guy, rattling around the halls of his “mildly steampunk” Williamsburg loft.
In a recent feature for New York Magazine, Karp avoids discussing the complexities of Tumblr’s monetization struggles and instead focuses on what’s really important: all those drones he keeps buying from China and subsequently crashing.
“I’m obsessed with drones right now,” Karp told the magazine. “I fly my drones all over Brooklyn. These things are amazing. These things are not regulated. I keep destroying them. I’ve had five of them.” Because he has to order the drones directly from China and have them delivered via the notoriously slow HK Post, Karp says he basically bulk orders the aerial toys so he’s never without them.
Perhaps the 27-year-old Tumblr founder is inching towards a quarter-life crisis, but instead of a Buggati and a twenty-something model girlfriend, he prefers a motorcycle sidecar and an army of cheap drones.
MORE: Inside Yahoo!’s Tumblr Deal: Here’s Who Hit the Billion Dollar Jackpot