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inspect the operation, Richardson began getting warnings of another, unexpected sort. “You’re going to love him,” Sean Parker told her. “He’s incredibly charismatic.”

Sure enough, when he appeared, Fanning was charming, telling Richardson how thrilled he was that she was running the company. “I was surprised he was so likable,” Richardson said. “I tried to be nice and listen to him.” Richardson made a distinct impression on Fanning as well: As soon as she was out of earshot, he turned to Parker and whispered, “She’s hot!” But the honeymoon was brief. As soon as Richardson dug into the books at Napster, she found herself in unfamiliar territory. For starters, Fanning and his marketing deputy, Tom Carmody, were each drawing monthly salaries of about $5,000 through December 1999 despite having no executive positions. “It was so far out of what I was used to,” Richardson said. Yosi Amram’s initial $250,000 investment also went to Hull and was under Fanning’s control for far longer than Richardson had expected. Fanning told her he was paying office expenses and salaries. Then he stalled her, telling Richardson that the rest of the money had been transferred to San Mateo. Finally, after Amram stepped in and insisted, Richardson got control of Napster’s money and cut off the payments to Fanning and Carmody. By then, $62,000 was gone, she said. Amram said he doesn’t recall how much Fanning spent in Hull.

It wasn’t even easy to sort out who owned how many shares in the company. Amram had bought the entire issue of Series A Senior shares, which had special rights, while the others had mainly Series A Junior shares. Amram paid 20 cents for his shares, while Richardson and Bales said they paid 30 cents, both to Fanning’s personal account. And Amram got another million shares of the Series A Junior direct from Fanning for what Amram said was 2 cents each, a mystifyingly low price. In declining order of their stakes, Napster’s junior holders included Fanning, Shawn, Amram, Jim Gidwitz, Bill Bales, Richardson, Aydar, and Brian McBarron. It remains unclear exactly how much John Fanning made by selling his shares through the course of Napster’s life. But a capitalization table reflecting the state of things after the Series A round shows him with fewer than 5 million shares, down from the 7 million he took when he incorporated the company. Based on what Amram, Richardson, and Bales say they paid for those 2 million shares, Fanning made more than

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