Pablo Escobar’s brother launches smartphone – and vows to sue Apple
The brother of Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar has launched a rather unexpected product: a foldable gold smartphone.
Roberto Escobar claims the $349 (£265) device – which is similar to Samsung’s Galaxy Fold and Huawei’s Mate X – is unbreakable.
Promotional stills of the Escobar Fold 1 feature Pablo’s grinning mugshot as a default background, and an advert for the phone features scantily dressed models in heels.
In an interview with Digital Trends, Mr Escobar said: “My phone cannot break, because I did not have to make a glass screen like Samsung.
“Our screen is made of a special type of plastic, and we still have the best resolution. Our special plastic is very difficult to break.”
Mr Escobar says he is determined to take on major tech giants – and he has the bold ambition of “beating Apple” and achieving dominance in the competitive smartphone market.
He has also revealed plans to sue Apple next month, and the entrepreneur says his lawyers are preparing a “$30bn class-action lawsuit for being “scammers” and “cheating the people and selling worthless phones”.
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Pablo Escobar, who led the Medellin Cartel in Colombia, was 44 when he was shot dead by police 25 years ago.
Often called “The King of Cocaine”, he was one of the wealthiest criminals in history.
The drug lord’s cartel supplied an estimated 80% of the cocaine smuggled into the US at the height of his career – making $21.9bn (£17.2bn) a year.
Forbes listed him as the world’s seventh-richest man in 1989 with an estimated net worth of $9bn (£7bn).
He donated 443 houses to formerly homeless people, and among locals, he was referred to as the “Colombian Robin Hood”.
