Mysterious will for late Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh's $500 million estate is fake, attorneys claim
The family of the late Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh claims a mysterious will that surfaced this year for the executive's $500 million fortune is a "sham" and is asking a court to invalidate the document.
The battle over the will comes five years after Hseih's death at age 46 from complications due to smoke inhalation from a house fire. After his death, which was ruled accidental, his family said Hsieh had died without leaving a will.
Earlier this year, however, a man purportedly named Kashif Singh claimed he had found Hsieh's will among his late grandfather's possessions. Singh claimed that his grandfather, Pir Muhammad, and Hsieh were "dear friends," although there's no evidence that the two knew each other, according to the Dec. 15 court filing, published by Las Vegas' KSNV-TV.
Attorneys for Hsieh's family didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hsieh, a Harvard University graduate, joined Zappos— then called ShoeSite.com — in 1999. Zappos was sold to Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2009, and Hsieh remained with the e-commerce company until he retired in 2020.
Reasons for suspicion
The court filing asks that the will be ruled a forgery, citing evidence that Hsieh's supposed signature is fake and that he had no known connection to Muhammad. According to the family's lawsuit, the will nominates two attorneys, who allegedly did not know Hsieh, to serve as his co-executors and oversee his estate.
"Scams come in all shapes and sizes," the Hsieh family's suit alleges. "In this case, the scam is in the form of a document being touted as the purported will of Anthony 'Tony' Hsieh."
It added, "The document was allegedly found by a complete stranger, many years after Tony's death, in the possession of the stranger's deceased grandfather, Pir Muhammad, a 91-year-old Pakistani man with no known ties to Tony."
The filing also notes that the document includes misspellings of Hsieh's name.
The Hsieh family hired an expert in detecting counterfeits to examine Hsieh's purported signatures on the will, the filing notes. The expert concluded there were "numerous unexplained differences" compared with Hsieh's known handwriting, leading him to conclude the will was forged.
Hsieh's family also claims that there's no evidence the businessman attended the will's signing, which supposedly occurred in March 2015, given that none of his calendars, emails and other documentation noted such an event.
It also claims that the five people who allegedly witnessed Hsieh signing the will cannot be located, and that "their contact information has been fabricated, and likely, they do not exist in real life."
