New court filings say Tristan Tate and Andrew Tate built their online wealth image on rented, leased or otherwise borrowed luxury, not on the ownership their posts suggested. British news outlets reported the filings on Tuesday, while Andrew Tate still has more than 10 million followers on X.
The brothers’ lawyers said their flaunting of supercars, luxury yachts and expensive watches should not be read as proof they were rich. They said the pair often lied online to seem influential and uberwealthy, and that claims of unlimited crypto and cash were untrue.
That matters because Andrew Tate has long used the kind of posts that made his name: “What color is your Bugatti?” style boasts, claims of nine-figure sums from his tweets, and an online persona built around money, dominance and spectacle. He has also claimed he will one day be U.K. prime minister. The filings now push back hard on the idea that the image and the balance sheet were the same thing.
The lawyers said a $7 million customized Bugatti, a $2.1 million Aston Martin and several bespoke watches were rented and not owned by either brother. They said Andrew Tate’s Bugatti Chiron Pur Sport was rented or corporate-leased rather than personally owned, and that online posts about the value of his watch collection were speculation, not evidence. Their filings also said the brothers needed to project that level of wealth to sell courses such as Hustlers University, which cost $49.99 a month, and a class on offshore tax structuring and asset management that cost $5,000 to join.
That is the friction at the center of the case: the luxury imagery was not just decoration, the lawyers said, but part of the sales pitch. They argued that “the outrageousness of the posts by them and about them is the point,” and that the more exaggerated the post, the more it draws views, likes and income. In that framing, the garage full of high-performance vehicles, the $50 million Obsidian Blade superyacht and the expensive watches were not receipts of wealth so much as props in a performance.
The brothers have been in federal custody since they were arrested by U.S. Marshals in Miami in July, and they are being held pending extradition back to the U.K. They also face almost 60 charges in the U.K. across years, leaving the new filings to do more than attack an image: they may help shape how courts assess the wealth claims that powered the Tate brand. The question now is not whether the posts were eye-catching. It is how much of the fortune they were meant to display was ever theirs at all.
