suicide. In 2007, Minor bought the historic Carter's Grove estate from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which he planned to use as a retreat and for horse-breeding. However, Minor never lived at the estate and the vacant 18th century mansion began to fall into disrepair. After he filed for personal bankruptcy in 2013 the property was sold at auction. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation submitted the only bid at the auction held on May 21, 2014, for the outstanding mortgage amount, and announced that it planned to resell it, with a price increased because of significant costs related to the sale, including over $600,000 in necessary repairs. Around the same time, Minor planned to build a $31 million luxury hotel in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. A dispute formed between Minor and the bank he said was going to provide financing. The project was abandoned in 2009. He also invested in substantial real property assets that declined in value during the housing crisis. Minor was involved in a series of legal disputes with Christie's and Sotheby's regarding art purchases. A jury awarded $8.57 million to Halsey from Christie's for keeping Halsey’s paintings when the paintings did not sell, despite promising to return them. Minor was required to pay for paintings he bid on but did not pay for. Sotheby’s filed suit for $16.8 million in unpaid debt for paintings Halsey bought. Halsey counter-sued saying that Sotheby’s routinely sold artwork without fully disclosing the paintings were still collateral for the prior owner’s loans. On May 24, 2010, Minor was ordered to pay the $6.6 million-plus he owed Sotheby's for backing out on his winning bids for three paintings. When Minor declared bankruptcy, he owed $100 million and had only $50 million in remaining assets. Recent work In 2014, Halsey Minor founded and launched a bitcoin platform Bitreserve now called Uphold.and a virtual reality company called Live Planet. In 2017, Minor created VideoCoin, which uses idle data center servers to support streaming video. In 2021, Minor founded Vivid Labs, a next-generation publishing and management platform that allows anyone to create, manage and sell multimedia NFTs. References 1964 births American computer businesspeople CNET Living people University of Virginia alumni Merrill (company) people Businesspeople from Charlottesville, Virginia Woodberry Forest School alumni