(Moderna’s follow-up announcement inspired a similar treatment.) At the same time, Litquidity began morphing into something of an advocacy tool for Wall Street analysts, tracking salary increases and bonus announcements and bringing transparency to a notoriously opaque system. In November 2020, for example, when Pfizer announced that its COVID vaccine was 90% effective, Lit responded with a chaotic, techno-backed video montage that featured a “bear cucks” station wagon driving off a cliff, “hedge fund PMs” breakdancing, and “the market” scoring a touchdown by performing a gravity-defying front flip over a “Fauci” defender.

But during the pandemic, amid one of the biggest bull markets in history, Litquidity proved especially potent, capturing the attention of Wall Street sharks and Reddit minnows alike with posts about financial and cultural trends and meme stocks. His early posts focused on the late nights, Sisyphean workloads, and megalomaniacal managers that he and his peers faced. “I saw parallels between the boot camp of interning on Wall Street and pledging a fraternity.” “Comedy’s always been my form of expression,” he says.

Litquidity started as a hobby in 2017, when Lit-then a 20-something banker in New York City-took inspiration from a Greek Life-parody blog that he followed in college to create the account. The question now is whether Lit can ride a bear market as well as he did the roaring one of the past couple of years. ” But growing a subversive media brand while the Dow is rising is one thing. “They have unique insights, and they can leverage their online presence in interesting ways.”Īnd lest any of his followers think that partne ring with an investment firm cofounded by Mitt Romney might dull Lit’s edge, he cleared things up when he tweeted his news of the partnership: “no this isn’t a full-time thing,” he wrote, “ the twitter sh*tpoasting show goes on. “Lit is part of this next generation of media entrepreneurs, like Packy McCormick, who has the popular Not Boring newsletter, that are leveraging their online platforms for investing,” says Christina Melas-Kyriazi, the Bain Capital Venture partner who brought him on. In January, Lit made a play for mainstream respectability by signing on as a venture scout for Bain Capital’s VC arm, helping to spot companies and occasionally coinvest as he builds out his own portfolio as an angel investor. He has a “meme services” arm (aka Memes-as-a-Service, or MaaS) and an e-commerce site selling the likes of “lever tf up” baseball caps and Lehman Brothers banker bags. In addition to his social accounts, he hosts a weekly podcast ( Big Swinging Decks ) that unpacks rumors and trends in the financial industry and writes a daily newsletter ( Exec Sum ) that breaks down news from Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

The meme-maker has enjoyed a bull run over the past couple of years, as he’s gone from making fun of bankers’ outfits to becoming a sharp observer of market trends, with a budding media empire to boot. A post shared by Litquidity Lit’s inspiration is Barstool, the infamously abrasive but undeniably successful digital media company, is telling.

I quit meme