Priscilla Presley's Son Fires Back At Critics Over GoFundMe Backlash For Pizza Company Based In His Driveway

If you're a celebrity's kid, you just can't win. Use your family's pull and you're a "nepo baby"; try to fundraise to start your own business and you're a shady grifter.

At least, that's how one celebrity spawn seems to feel.

Priscilla Presley's son Navarone Garibaldi Garcia, Priscilla Presley's son with her second husband, music producer Marco Garibaldi, is in hot water online after starting a GoFundMe to cover start-up costs for his new pizza business.

The backlash was swift, and in a since-deleted Instagram post, Garibaldi Garcia clapped back hard at what he called "haters" who kept telling him to "ask your mom."

@nava_rone/Instagram

Deleting the post hasn't seemed to make the flap die down.

It all began when he announced that he'd found a perfect brick pizza oven with which to start his business, but he was $5,500 short of the price.

As he wrote on his GoFundMe:

"...I would like to make and serve affordable organic pizza for my community and sell it from my driveway to the large foot traffic in my neighborhood."

"I have found a large industrial pizza oven and negotiated it from $14,000 down to $8,500."

"I have 3,000 saved up for this… I would truly appreciate any help."

You can probably guess how well that went down online. People were furious at the very notion that, in today's economy, a rich celebrity's kid would be taking up space on a tool often used by regular people who've lost everything they have.

Torrents of angry comments quickly flooded in, many of the "go ask your mom" variety, and many others from people furious that amid everyone else's financial struggles, they were being asked to donate to a celebrity kid's flight of fancy.

Garibaldi Garcia was quick to clapback at "the haters." In his follow-up post, he wrote in the caption:

“Haters gonna hate. I’m sure I’ll have to explain this many more times to ignorant people who think I should ‘ask my mom’ or that I have money….."

"YEAH, I also have a lot of bills, I also have a budget, I also donate to other causes... I also give to the homeless. I just don't film and put it on YouTube."

He went on to explain why asking Presley for money was a bad idea:

"I also have crazy ADD and try to do lots of things… if I just went all in every time I thought I had a great idea… I’d be broke in 2 days."

This seemed to only make people angrier.

Of course, the flip side to this is that a celebrity's kid posting a GoFundMe does not exactly destroy people's free will! As Garibaldi Garcia himself said, nobody has to donate if they don't want to.

And there were a few people online who felt similarly.

And others applauded him for taking initiative to make his own way in the world instead of just resting on his gazillionaire mother's laurels.

Anyway, you know what they say: There's no such thing as bad publicity, and Garibaldi Garcia has been leaning into the uproar.

And it's been a huge success: his GoFundMe has exceeded his goal by nearly $300 as of this writing, so it looks like his LA neighborhood will be getting those pizzas after all. Think it's safe to assume the haters won't be invited.