TL;DR

Andre Balazs is the owner of the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood that Q referenced in a post back on April 20, 2018. [1121272]

Nobody seems to have caught on to the fact that Balazs worked in the biotech industry before becoming a hotelier, which is HUGELY suspicious because the biotech industry relies on a constant supply of human tissue to make its products.

Let's look closer...

Andre Balazs' Background

Before he became a hotelier, Balazs worked at BioMatrix, his family's New Jersey based biotechnology company. [1]

Andre's grandfather Endre Balazs started the company up in 1981, where he developed a biomedical product that's manufactured out of hyaluronan, a "viscoelastic polysaccharide present in all tissues of the human body but in large amounts in the vitreous of the eye and the soft tissues of joints and skin." The process for making this product involves extracting the hyaluronan and purifying it in order to make a biomedical product used in surgery. [2]

Did you catch that? BioMatrix requires harvested human tissue to manufacture its products. Having worked there for his grandfather (probably in an administrative capacity, since he doesn’t appear to have any technical training), Andre Balazs would be familiar with the biotech industry and would probably have connections to companies that need tissue on a regular basis, as well as to tissue suppliers.

Andre Balazs married a woman named Katie Ford in 1985. [4] At the time of their marriage, Katie worked at her family's modeling agency, Ford Models, Inc. [8]

Balazs worked at BioMatrix until 1990 when he decided to venture into the hotel industry by buying the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. This was the first in a string of ritzy boutique hotels he has purchased over the years. [4] He opened the first Standard Hotel on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip in 1999, intending it to be an “affordable” if individualistic property, but the chain quickly attracted a high-end clientele. [19]

Meanwhile, Katie took over her family business in 1995, and as CEO she expanded it into a vast network of modeling scouts and recruiters that spans the globe, turning the business into one of the largest modeling agencies in the world with many high-end clients. [8]

BioMatrix was sold to Genzyme in 2000 for an estimated $738 million. [1] Endre Balazs, the owner of BioMatrix, was taken to court by Genzyme for artificially inflating the company's stock value in the months leading up to its sale in 2000. [3]

By 2010 Genzyme was the third largest biotech company in the world, with a presence in approximately 65 countries, including 17 manufacturing facilities and 9 genetic-testing laboratories, and employing over 11,000 people. They generated $3.8 billion in revenue in 2007. They’ve been buying up many smaller biotech companies over the years. [6]

In 2013, Balazs detached the Standard brand from Andre Balazs Properties, the company that holds his wider hotel and real estate empire. He formed a separate management company — Standard International — selling an 80% stake to a group of private individuals for an undisclosed price. [19]

In 2017, Balazs stepped down as chairman of the Standard Hotel brand, retaining a 20% share in Standard International and stakes in some of the individual hotels within that brand. He continued to own and manage other hotels outside of the Standard brand. [19]

Side Note: Standard Hotel employees were once caught dumping two 50-gallon drums of chemicals down a storm drain. One of the chemicals they were dumping - muriatic acid - is very similar to hydrochloric acid in that it can dissolve bone and tissue. [1]