Gurbaksh Chahal: The real life Mr. 'Gray'

They are both tycoons. Their initials, though in reverse, are the same. One, however, is a piece of fiction. The other— well, his life story is pretty much a page-turner. Fittingly, it took one character to inspire another. In 2014, Gurbaksh Chahal, co-founder of Gravity4, had been removed from the last company he started, following a fight with his girlfriend a year earlier. He had hit and kicked her 117 times, which resulted in probation for the tech mogul and shattered his reputation.

Chahal tried to fix it by creating an alter ego named Christian Gray, not Grey, near aping the protagonist of racy best-seller ‘ 50 Shades of Grey’. Co-workers claim Chahal would email marketing professionals as Gray, and when he hooked a potential customer, the CEO would berate staff for being outsold by a fake person. Of course, the tale which has been recounted in a Bloomberg profile of the entrepreneur, is unverified.

Fact or fiction. In Chahal’s world, there seems to be no telling when either one can get more stranger than the other.