Meet John Fenley, Digital Folk Hero
A bizarre entrepreneur chronicles his misadventures in a breadcrumb trail left on social media
Our story begins in Provo, Utah in October of 2019. John Fenley — Investor, crypto enthusiast, landlord, father — is hunting for a space big enough for a couple of pet projects. In early 2020 he acquired Murfie, a media storage and streaming startup which came with close to a million user-owned CDs for the low price of $8,000. He also needed room for Serendipic, his all-in-one makerspace, science museum, art studio and business incubator — and for his experimental fusion reactor.
In a post on YCombinator, John detailed his “nation-wide search” for the “largest, cheapest building in the entire continental US.” He found a home for his projects in a former Varco Pruden plant in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.
“[It] seemed too good to be true. A 220,000 sq ft metal warehouse and office complex on 17 acres. I thought the price was a typo at $375k. The agent assured me that the price was correct, and I flew out to see the place.” He had made an offer that was ¾ the asking price, and soon found himself the new owner of a Class C Industrial building on the small city’s west side. His problems began almost immediately.
There are many facets to John Fenley’s story, which he generally organizes by topic according to social media platform. John is conscientious to diversify his content. He posts about fusion on Reddit. He rants about Pine Bluff on Twitter. YouTube seems to be his professional account. On SoundCloud he posts recordings of fights with trespassers. The full pontifier story is a wacky tapestry of posts guiding the online public through every fuckup in exacting detail. This is not a tale of triumph but of contstant downfall, an antagonist spiraling beyond redemption.
Pine Bluff, Arkansas
Roughly 45 miles south of Little Rock, the Pine Bluff metropolitan area is home to a little over 100,000 residents. Over 75 percent of those residents are African-American. The city has experienced gradual economic decay not unlike that known throughout the rust belt. To these citizens, John Fenley promised hope.
John first mentioned the Pine Bluff property in a YouTube video from October 28, 2019 titled Can I create the world’s largest Makerspace? He gives viewers a three minute tour of the crumbling factory, gawking at the size of the place. In a tweet posted a day later, he pines that “this could be my Colorado Springs.”
On November 22 of 2019, John poses next to his dad in front of a recently purchased Yang Ming freight container, renewing his commitment to build “the largest #Makerspace in the world.”
Fenley had some experience operating a makerspace. His first was ProVolt, out of his home city of Provo. The ProVolt website seems like a time capsule of this moment before the big move. The website lists a CNC Waterjet among other tools, and a vertical axis wind turbine as the only member project. The turbine’s description reads, verbatim: “A Vertical Axis Wind Turbine,(VAWT) is good way of making electricity for residential uses. There are a couple of use that are going to build one or two for ProVolt, I Can’t wait to get the up and running.” ProVolt, now under the theoretical umbrella of Serendipic, has yet to see any more completed member projects at the time of writing.
On December 11 of 2019, John made a blog post on ProVolt that signaled the space’s close. In addition to again promising the “world’s largest Makerspace,” John made new commitments including a “dorm where visitors can stay while working on projects.” His vision was escalating.
On March 1 of 2020, John loaded up his kids and left for Madison, Wisconsin where his recently acquired Murfie assets were waiting. To reassure customers, he tweeted incessantly about the assets and set up a Twitch live stream which showed him unloading the media from a Madison warehouse in late March of 2020. He and his team hit a snag trying to move two freight containers of CDs into Arkansas, which at the height of the pandemic were considered inessential goods. These CDs presumably had to be left in containers back in Wisconsin. John was unfazed by this and proceeded to Pine Bluff anyway, posting, “It’s okay, though, because [this] will give me time to get the warehouse set up and work on the website.”
On April 6, John tweeted: “I think I literally have the largest home in the US right now. I'm using a loading dock as a closet, and this morning I drove from where I slept to the bathroom.” He later uploaded a video where he drove around the inside of the facility late at night, hitting speeds of up to 20mph. Three days later he gave the first glimpse of his new digs, a smaller building he claimed as his dormitory.
At this point Fenley and his small crew had no electricity or internet. The facility went without a city water meter until February 2021. In June 2022 a clip uploaded to John’s SoundCloud titled What do you want the water on for? suggests that the facility has not yet had running water at the time of writing.
It’s not clear what John planned to do when he arrived in Pine Bluff. With no Murfie CDs to sort and no equipment to build a makerspace (he left the 4.5 ton waterjet in Utah), it seems that Fenley and co. only had enough equipment to sweep up. And not even that went well.
On May 12 of 2020, John hit his first major roadblock, tweeting: “if I can’t work through it fast then I’m done here.” John’s roadblock turned out to be the Department of Human Services. The DHS was concerned that John’s children were living with him out in that factory. Threatened with loss of custody over his kids, he quickly arranged for them to go back with their mother to Utah. According to a Murfie Update (the title of a video series meant for Murfie customers) from January of 2022, John would go the next two Christmases without seeing them.
The first of many thefts happened while John was sending his kids off. Someone had gone onto the property and stolen his generator, despite it being latched to the building with a bike lock.
Little headway had been made two months later when he tweeted, “I'm miserable. I can't sleep, I can't think, I can't escape the thousands of mosquitoes that are eating me alive. I've been living for the past 3 months with no utilities in a giant warehouse that I can't make enough progress on...” A week later he tweeted that his giant chess set had been stolen in the night. John’s luck wasn’t close to turning around. The city was growing hostile to his presence.
At about 10:30 on July 25 of 2020, John Fenley’s tent was approached by 2 or 3 young men who claimed that their father owned the building. John began recording audio on his phone, which he later uploaded to SoundCloud. At 0:49, he asks “is that a gun you’re holding?” He takes a moment before calling the police, at which point the young men demand his keys. Two shots are heard before the entrepreneur dials 911 and ends the recording. The shooter turned out to be his father, who held one of the young men at gunpoint until police arrived.
In late August, John was making progress on Murfie, which was back up and running after almost a year-long hiatus. The CDs had finally made their way down from Wisconsin to Arkansas. John’s tone on social media became optimistic. Then on September 8 he had a run in with poison ivy, and was robbed two more times — all in a 24 hour stretch. “That’s 8 [robberies] since April. Pine Bluff needs more resilient cooperators.”
Getting Up To Code
John Fenley’s posts began hinting at permit troubles in late September. The city required a licensed architect to draft firewall plans of his ventures, and licensed contractors to bring the buildings up to code. John went with “Plan B” instead. “It involves buying solar panels and a couple more shipping containers.” He had somehow failed for months to acquire an occupancy permit, but by November 11, Plan B was in full swing. His containers — sitting on the asphalt outside of the complex — were rigged with solar panels. He still needed internet.
Earlier in October, John had put together his “mobile media processing facility,” a tent in the back of his pickup truck where he could rip CDs for Murfie clients. He found a spot close enough to the county building that he could connect to guest Wifi under a pavilion, which gave him enough juice to work well into the night.
Christmas was fast approaching as John Fenley procrastinated work on his complex. On December 14, a zoning official demanded he take down his containers. The city viewed them as accessory buildings which he had also not obtained permits for. John set up a meeting with the mayor to challenge the zoning demand, a potentially beneficial dialogue which went nowhere.
Murfie’s customers didn’t get another update until New Year’s day of 2021, when John uploaded a bizarre video from inside one of his shipping containers — presumably the one he called home. This was another short Murfie update, meant for the customers whose CDs he now ripped from the bed of a truck. In the video he is decked out in a winter jacket and toque, and promises that the backlog of refund requests will be processed soon. On January 21 of 2021, John met with the mayor again. This time he was ordered to cease occupancy of the shipping containers immediately. He shared a picture of the written notice on Twitter, which happened to contain a summary of activity his complex had been approved for, giving us insight into future projects. This included “sculpture garden”, “art foundry”, and “robot combat arena”. It did not include “home”.
In an unsettling post from January 2021, John tweeted: “If I go missing, or am murdered, please investigate.” This came shortly before the revelation that a part of his building had been occupied by a tenant who was grandfathered in when John bought the property — he had failed to mention that for close to a year.
It was immediately clear that John didn’t get along with his tenant, who we only know as “Josh.” In a YouTube video from April 2021, John records himself giving Josh a 14-day notice due to unpaid rent and other violations, which ironically included the tenant’s own lack of occupancy permit. At one point he tries to evict Josh immediately, before cooling back down to the 14-day demand. John stays and argues with Josh, who we learn borrowed cash from the millionaire to buy a car. Near the end of the video John yells, “I don’t want you around anymore because you bother me.”
John Fenley’s relationship to Josh devolves rapidly from here into a kind of sitcom. The fire department was called at least 4 times to put out trash fires which Josh started. At one point Josh runs his truck into a telephone pole on the property — Fenley records his outrage at the pole, and at the damage to Josh’s truck. Security-cam footage uploaded to YouTube on April 25 called The shit I deal with shows John throwing things at Josh as he berates him while two potential investors look on.
In another 30 minute CCTV video uploaded to YouTube, we see Josh approach the entrepreneur as he sleeps in the bed of his pickup truck. The video, meant to make us annoyed at Josh, instead reveals the bizarre lengths John Fenley has gone to avoid bringing his complex up to code. John happily shares these details with us, likely believing we’ll feel sympathy if we only knew what he was going through behind the scenes.
On May 8, 2022, John tweeted out congratulating his son on graduating 6th grade. “Love you tons. Wish I could have been there.”
John Fenley reported that Josh was finally evicted on June 25 of 2021, in another strange post which includes a photo of water spraying out of a leaking pipe somewhere in the warehouse. During this period, John was bidding on another building to run Murfie out of, without success.
Soon after this Plan C failed, John sold a huge number of shares in a startup he had been involved with since 2014. According to a reddit post, he now had close to a million dollars to continue funding his projects. After this point discussion of his fusion reactor happens more frequently, and Murfie takes a backseat; the next Murfie update doesn’t come until October. A nuclear reactor was now in the cards. “For my entire life up until 3 weeks ago, money was the main constraint on what I could do. That barrier instantly evaporated and brought up many philosophical questions. I'm still trying to understand it.”
We get a glimpse at ongoing municipal tensions in a video titled Murfie Status 10-18-2021, where a city councilman tells John: “there is a process, Mr. Fenley, that you have to go through to get buildings qualified for any kind of improvements, and those things are not much negotiable.” We also learn that John had hired as many as eight electricians and three architects to help him wedge his CDs past the red tape, each without success.
Johnny Goes Nuclear
John Fenley finally received a temporary building permit on February 10, 2022. In under a week, progress began on his fusion reactor. On February 15, he got his hands on a 17 ton MRI magnet to provide the uniform magnetic field for his prototype, which is documented on his YouTube channel. On March 31 he attended a conference on nuclear fusion in Washington DC. On April 30, he learned that the February 10 building permit was actually invalid, somehow issued in error. This seemed to have been enough to halt public updates on his prototype for the time being.
The millionaire was the victim of a major burglary on the weekend of June 12. This was more than a generator or catalytic converter — thieves had broken the locks on all four of John’s containers, making off with vacuum pumps, welders, sculptures, and a security system. Murfie CDs and vinyl were supposedly left alone, though John posted a video showing media boxes which had been torn and rummaged through. He estimates the total damages for this theft are somewhere near $20,000. Responding to the theft, the millionaire offered a $100 reward per criminal for “every month they are in jail” on his website bensforbars.com. He has experienced at least three more robberies between then and now, one which he caught in the act. He details holding that thief at gunpoint on his twitter account.
In the meantime John faces heightened scrutiny from the city of Pine Bluff. On July 30 he offered a glimpse at the penalty he was served by a city code enforcement officer, though it isn’t clear from the post what that penalty is. In that post from YCombinator about his search for a warehouse, John mentions that he “ended up buying about 75 more properties here… all surprisingly cheap.” Whether this is a bid to pad his losses or force the city of Pine Bluff to pay attention is uncertain, but it seems he really did buy property. A Ctrl + F search for “John Fenley” on this real estate listing reveals a recently purchased Pine Bluff house belonging to our hero. He has certainly leased property before, and likely has more rental properties outside of Pine Bluff. Reporting by Max Read confirms this.
John Fenley’s story is almost too absurd to believe. Carefully placed crumbs tell a fascinating story of sacrifice and turmoil. Though there are certainly residents in Provo and Pine Bluff who deal with John personally, most of the info we have comes from John himself, scattered like a forensic puzzle across his low performing socials.
John is the folk hero redefined. Left to incubate in his factory, he might have become the Marvin Heemeyer of his generation. Like all folk heroes, John has courage. He believes in transparency — this is his heroes code. He is not famous or well liked. His adventures are outlandish and memorable. He carries a sense of frontier justice with him as he puts plan into action. More than all that, he sleeps in the bed of a pickup truck in bum fuck Arkansas.
Oh my goodness I spent a few hours this afternoon trying to piece this story together but you have done a great job here. Such a wild tale.