StubHub’s CEO Built a Hedge Fund to Scalp Tickets and Resell Them to His Own Platform – Lawmakers Declare ‘Buying Tickets Has Gotten Outrageously Expensive’

Buying tickets to see your favorite band used to be pretty simple. But nowadays, it has turned into an Olympic sport.

If a really big name is coming to town, you can expect to spend a good 4 hours battling bots in a virtual queue. And if you're lucky enough to get through to checkout, your reward is a dynamic pricing model that multiplies your grand total before you've even had time to enter your credit card details.

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That's why live entertainment has turned into a luxury for a lot of us, and the ongoing narrative is that merciless scalpers and resellers are to blame. But Congress just flipped the script after publicly calling out StubHub (STUB) CEO Eric Baker for using his secondary market to generate unfair profits.

It turns out that Baker isn't only the CEO of StubHub. He's also the co-manager of a ticket-focused investment fund that buys tickets in bulk and resells them through platforms like StubHub. According to lawmakers, that means institutional ticket resellers are getting a huge advantage and further inflating the costs of an industry that already feels like it's stacked against ordinary fans.