Shalom Meckenzie made a $1.4 billion fortune after merging his gambling software company with DraftKings. Now he's rolling the dice on Amp, an at-home exercise machine startup. It's a long-shot bet—but he has a good reason to make it
“People have the right to say maybe I’m a bored billionaire,” Meckenzie says of his push into fitness. “It’s not a hobby. I’m passionate about it.”
In October 2020, Shalom Meckenzie was playing poker with his employees on a 192-foot yacht off the coast of Greece, celebrating that his gambling software company, the Isle of Man–based SBTech, had merged with DraftKings to go public via a SPAC in a $975 million deal a few months earlier. As the largest shareholder of DraftKings, Meckenzie became a billionaire that May when its share price passed $25. During one of the poker hands, he made a losing bet that would cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars—and inspire his next venture.
One of his top product executives in Bulgaria weighed 280 pounds but had never been motivated to lose weight. Meckenzie, feeling flush with success, proposed a big wager. “I told him that if by the first of January you’re below [220 pounds] I’m going to take a 300-foot yacht in the Caribbean, and you’re going to choose all the people that are going to go on the yacht, and you’re going to have the craziest and most fun week you will ever have,” says the 48-year-old Meckenzie from his home office outside Tel Aviv, Israel.
The employee, Ian Bradley, accepted the wager. The other executives sitting on the yacht realised that if their colleague won, they would get a vacation invitation and decided to help him lose the weight. Back in Bulgaria, they put a stationary bike in Bradley’s living room, threw out the junk food in his pantry and hired a chef and personal trainer. The trainer was told he would get a big bonus if Bradley lost 60 pounds over the next few months. He lost the weight and won the bet.
“It was one of the best bets I’ve lost in my life,” says Meckenzie, who is in great shape for any age, let alone a man nearing his 50th birthday. Meckenzie flew Bradley and ten others on a private jet to Dubai, where they stayed at a five-star hotel and partied for five days. “I think it ended up costing much more than a yacht in the Caribbean,” Meckenzie says, laughing.
That friendly wager became Meckenzie’s proof of concept for his newest company, Amp Fitness, which is based in New York City. He isn’t the first one to think there’s a big business in at-home workouts: Amp’s business model is nearly identical to that of a slew of failed and struggling exercise companies like Tonal, Peloton and Mirror: Sell wealthy folks an expensive machine, hire a bunch of celebrity trainers, collect “data” and then pray you can make money by expanding into more profitable ancillary markets (personalised nutrition, subscriptions and apparel) before the customers get bored and move on. It hasn’t worked for anyone else, but that’s not stopping Meckenzie, who is largely self-financing the company for now.
(This story appears in the 02 May, 2025 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)