Business influencer Derek Moneyberg recently posted about how he "earned" his Jiu Jitsu black belt in just 3.5 years. The announcement post came with a star studded picture of him receiving the belt next to BJJ and MMA legends Jake Shields, Frank Mir, Lyoto Machida, and Glover Teixeira.

Now 3.5 years to black belt normally would be an insanely impressive feat reserved for phenoms like BJ Penn - who proved his Jiu Jitsu worth by winning the world championships (and becoming the first non Brazilian to do so). We surveyed nearly 2,000 Jiu Jitsu practitioners and the results showed on average it takes 13.3 years to earn a black belt in Jiu Jitsu.

As expected, the Jiu Jitsu community went nuts over Derek Moneyberg's promotion to black belt. Basically all the feedback was negative and implying he bought his belt. All of the feedback that is, aside from top athletes who were coaching Derek along the way (like Gordon Ryan and Mikey Musumeci).

Now the feedback from those coaches... was it legit? Or are they too financially tied to the situation to give an objective opinion on whether Derek Moneyberg truly deserves a BJJ black belt in just 3.5 years. Craig Jones posted some receipts showing that Moneyberg was paying solid money (by Jiu Jitsu standards) just to drop by for an interview:

Well, there is a saying in Jiu Jitsu that "the mat's don't lie." At the end of the day, this is a sport where you have to put your skills to the test for everyone to see.

For someone like Derek Moneyberg who posts an insanely high volume of social media content, it is very curious that there is super hard to find any footage of him rolling. He claims to have been training over 2 hours a day, every single day, for the past 3.5 years.

We were able to find just two clips of Derek Moneyberg actually training Jiu Jitsu. This one on Instagram:

and this one on YouTube:

To be fair to Derek Moneyberg, people on the internet are pros at taking the worst possible angles or clips and spinning them out of context. While the first one looks... well, pretty bad. In the second one he's moving significantly better.

Derek Moneyberg has been chiming in on the comments, and let's just say he's not happy with the Jiu Jitsu community's response to his promotion.

So, what do you think? Did Derek Moneyberg truly earn a BJJ black belt?