R8 me L8 but what happened to Tony’s glittering future as a scientist?
You mean his sociology PhD? It's reasonably common for PhD candidates to drop out, I wouldn't read too much into it. But then again most PhD students don't go round telling the world just how amazing they are, and that they'll be Dr Billy Big Bollocks in no time at all, you'll see!
To me, Tony seems to go through periods of very intense obsession with something (drugs, academics, tropical weather, political forecasting, Christianity, and now transgenderism) which he ultimately loses interest in.
What is their financial situation so grim that it demands this? Or is it just sheer, brass bollocked greediness alone? Surely there has to be at least some pathetic semi justifiable excuse?
Personally, and perhaps this is not a common view ITT, I don't think either Tony or Zac are especially shameless grifters. It's not like the Tranch where their fundraisers were obvious scams: "Give us money for mutual aid for local Native Americans, one of which just conveniently happens to be our lawyer."
Zac has run one fundraiser, of
$9,000 to cover his vaginoplasty expenses. It's only just made its target, as a result of all the recent attention he's had.
Tony has done two:
$24,000 to "buy Erin a vagina" and $44,000 to "fight to keep Erin's son". Tony is good at driving the Twitter outrage machine, and painted the custody fight as him, a poor uwu trans woman, facing off against his transphobic bitch of a wife. His vaginoplasty fundraiser was well before he had a paid Substack, so I think donations to that were at least partly driven by Twitter troons and troon-adjacent people "giving back" for his tweeting. (Edit: I believe he did have another short-lived one, maybe before the custody GFM, to help him pay for laser hair removal.)
As for Tony's finances more generally, I imagine he had a fair amount of student debt: a undergrad degre, a masters degree, and at least a few years of PhD study where it wouldn't surprise me if he racked up credit card debt.
I do remember that in some of his early (2019) photos posted to Twitter, he had an Uber sticker in his windshield, suggesting he was supplementing his salary at ShareBlue/The American Independent by taking cab fares.