'Impossible Is Nothing' Aleksey Vayner Dead at 29

He is famous for the worst video resume ever created. (Embedded below the fold.) UBS Financial Services leaked it on the internet. There were many parodies, and he was relentlessly mocked. He deserved it, I guess, but I feel guilty for having mocked him myself. People like that are trying to compensate for terribly low self-esteem. Apparently it was a heart attack from a drug overdose.

Even before he arrived as a freshman at Yale, Vayner had become known for exaggerating his own feats.

At a 2002 event in New Haven for high-school seniors who have been admitted to Yale, Vayner told current students all about his abilities and specialised skills.

He told Jordan Bassm a freshman student at the Ivy League college that he had taught tennis to Jerry Seinfeld and Harrison Ford and that the Dalai Lama had apparently written his college recommendation.

'He talked for, like, six hours straight the first night,' said Bass to the New Yorker magazine after they investigated Vayner in 2006 following his notorious video job application.

'He had a lot of affiliations with élite institutions. He was an action star, an espionage expert, and a professional athlete. He would be on the C.I.A. firing range one day and, the next, at a martial-arts competition that took place in this secret system of tunnels underneath Woodstock, New York.

'Then he was at a skiing competition in Switzerland. He told us the Russian Mafia had him forging passports.'

. . .

Attending Yale despite the attention of the article, Vayner arrived with a CV that now boasted he had begun modelling for the price of $200 an hour, written a book about the Holocaust and founded a charity for troubled children.

He also claimed to have won two tennis matches against Pete Sampras, retired from professional martial arts and mastered the art of 'bone setting'.

According to the article, a friend on Facebook was concerned about his health the night before he died, "Do not, anyone, sell this idiot ANY pills!"

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posted by rdbrewer at 12:08 PM

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