Guys I've been living under a rock...
Why he retired?
He got high off the Michael Bay Transformers fame, and didn't take it so well when they eventually had no more use for him.
So he made his own little independent short film which did well at the Cannes Film Festival.
Then it was discovered that he plagiarized the story from a little-known artist who he had once listed as one of his heroes. Most people seemed to say that if he had given a small nod to the artist, and said the story was based on some art that he really liked, that everyone would've been cool with it, but he claimed in interviews (before the connection was discovered) that the concept and ideas were all his own.
After he was discovered, he apparently (in a panic) Googled for a defense of plagiarism, and cut-and-pasted somebody else's arguments into twitter. People discovered that he was plagiarizing his defense of plagiarism, and had a good chuckle.
Then he started to claim that he was doing it on purpose, and went on a rampant streak of copying famous people's words.
Then he apparently had a mental breakdown and started claiming that his entire life is performance art.