the wife is usually the number one suspect in a murder. but as soon as news broke that United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot in midtown Manhattan at 6:45am, just an hour before the Minnesota executive was scheduled to speak at an annual healthcare investor conference, a little alarm went off in my brain: it’s an ‘eat the rich’ thing.
in keeping with the cinema-ready performance that this individual intended, I thought of Runaway Jury, in which (very expired spoiler alert) two victims of a school shooting execute a decades-long plan to get on a jury to convict firearms executives. my projection of pain and grief onto this then-unknown suspect as a motive was potentially a charitable take, but it was my first assumption.
as many on the internet celebrated his crime and speculated over his identity, some believed he might be a hired professional assassin given how he appeared relatively steady on the video of the shooting. as if the average American doesn’t know how to competently use a gun. there were some who suggested that Thompson was set to testify against UHC in a DOJ investigation, so some investors had him whacked. as if the government uncovering corporate malfeasance would ever be a serious enough threat to UHC that they would assassinate their own executive.
the 5-day manhunt that unfolded referenced a trail of blue chip American brands, from the mistaken reports that the suspect fled on a Citibike and had stopped at a Starbucks before the shooting, to his final apprehension at a McDonald’s (in an anonymous strip mall, across from Popeye’s, Jersey Mike’s, and Sheetz).
now that Luigi Mangione has been identified and his photos are splashed across every screen, we have a sketch of a bio:
Mangione was the valedictorian at the Gilman School, an all-boys prep school in the Baltimore area
he was in a frat at UPenn and graduated in 2020 with a degree in engineering, then later worked as a counselor for pre-college students at a Stanford University summer program
he taught himself how to code in high school and while at Penn, he co-founded an extracurricular club where students could develop their own video games
he was most recently employed as a data engineer by TrueCar Inc., a publicly traded new and used car-buying marketplace, between 2021 and 2023. his last known address was in Honolulu.
the Mangiones are a large and prominent family around the Baltimore area, and one of his cousins is an elected official… which makes you wonder, how did an elderly patron and employee at McDonald’s in bumbfuck Altoona recognize this guy but not a single one of his family members did? or better yet, not a single girl who he ghosted in college?
Luigi appears to be a social guy who has done an above-average amount of traveling (per instagram and facebook), and he has no prior criminal record. but he does look like someone who would have ghosted at least one girl criminally enough to turn him in.
his social media accounts provide a clearer picture of his ideological proclivities. this is not the leftist working class hero that the internet was projecting last week. instead, we can see the strong influence of prominent manosphere figures like Lex Fridman and Andrew Huberman. the only article linked on his facebook was this WSJ article on entitlements from over a decade ago. his twitter account features more recent retweets on topics like the existential future of human society (bad), the impact of technology (and fleshlights) on the human brain, and the ethics of murder.
he is also clearly an avid reader, and his Goodreads account indicates that he read the Unabomber’s book earlier this year. here is an excerpt from his review:
UPDATE 12/10: several sources who know Mangione have said that he had cut contact with all his friends and family about six months ago. his behavior in that time is allegedly tied to chronic back pain that had a significant impact on his life and functioning. there appears to be evidence on social media that people were looking for him, and his family reported him missing to the San Francisco PD on November 18th.
his family released the below statement regarding the shooting, courtesy of his Nino Mangione, who has served as Maryland state delegate (R) since 2019
I prefer to sidestep conversations that bore me, and one of them is the gasping faux-spiritual commentary from trad media about never celebrating murder and the value of every human life, etc. I feel confident that this 26-year-old individual, whose social media feed provides a map to the crime, foresaw and hoped for that exact conversation: the “establishment” digging in their heels yet again in order to uphold long-expired mores that only ever existed in the context of an entirely different social contract.
this murder was about performance. there was a calculation made and he counted on the prevailing mood to lead the public to make the same one: it’s okay for him to kill this one executive, who is ostensibly responsible for (and the beneficiary of!) countless death and suffering, because Americans have been screwed badly enough that there will be widespread debate over whether his crime was a just one. even before Mangione’s motives and bio were known, he had already been dubbed by the internet as “The Claims Adjustor.”
Brian Thompson and those like him have made more money than 99.9% of humans will ever see in their lives, much more than any one person could ever need or “deserve.” they have earned that money as a result of denying paying customers (us) the healthcare (and thus, the health) for which they paid those burdensome and inescapable premiums. we can see online, with every gleeful comment and laughing emoji, exactly how many people have made the ethical calculation that Mangione did. his goal seems to have been to unearth that reaction, with the automated assistance of our rage-inducing algorithms, so people could see just how many comrades they have.
when it emerged that the bullet casings were inscribed with what is an undeniable rallying cry against the insurance industry (DELAY, DENY, DEPOSE), I started to perceive this murder as a carefully staged indictment against our system, a plan full of dark but purposeful easter eggs.
the Monopoly money in his backpack; the discarded plastic water bottle and wrapper as clues (he was a climate activist). based on the sheer number of household brands touched by this story (Citibank, Hilton, Starbucks, McDonalds, Greyhound), I imagine he knew what kinds of reactions would proliferate online around these references.
his 3-page manifesto has not been made public yet, but so far, it’s been reported that it contains the following: “these parasites had it coming…I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.” he reportedly detailed his frustrations with the healthcare industry and says that he acted alone. I have a feeling that whatever manifesto this valedictory Penn grad produced was decently well-written. if you thought it was crazy when Osama bin Laden’s letter went viral, just wait till people see what this Ivy League-educated thirst trap has to say. UHC better hope this guy can’t write a punchline.
police said that Mangione had his passport on him when he was found in Altoona, Pennsylvania. he had been on the run for 5 days by then, and easily could have escaped the country before his name and photos were widely circulated. instead he gets caught in a declining industrial town in rural PA, that few outside the region or state would’ve ever heard of, and to which he has no clear connection. it’s giving statement town (I am probably reading too much into this).
anyone under age 50 knows that not deleting his social media was a deliberate choice
also, your attempts at gun control are useless, no matter what silly legislation you pretend to try to pass. he reportedly used a ghost gun that he made for himself using a 3D printer.
this person is resourceful and self-taught. perhaps he has a diagnosable mental or physical health problem for which he has been denied coverage, which led him to this. perhaps it was a loved one. perhaps nothing, and he just wants to get a little more of today’s most valuable currency if you have no cold hard USD: attention.
given this pattern, this is what I can see happening next in this saga. he gets formally arrested and charged. I predict he is counting on getting off after creating some OJ Simpson-esque spectacle, in which he is either defended by high-powered lawyers paid for by his family (thus making an adjacent socioeconomic point), or he will potentially defend himself in court. his best chance at freedom is jury nullification, and he seems to have a strong grasp of how to maneuver systemic realities, so my guess is that he will work that angle during the legal proceedings. maybe I’ve watched too many things (The Joker, Mr. Robot), but I perceive a man whose goal is to create a spectacle upon which Americans can lay their anger bare, raw and real and cruel.
in any event, it appears to be more about the circus than the death of this particular executive or any other (which is, I’m guessing, how he would argue insurance executives view the lives of their customers), and I have little doubt he has already reasoned that he is willing to risk spending the rest of his life in prison, which perhaps he believes is avoidable if he achieves some sort of folk-hero status and games the system that way. and even if he’s convicted of a crime, I surmise that his attitude towards life in prison may be something like, “good, it’s about time the state takes care of me for once.”
my further prediction is that not much will change, systemically-speaking, any time soon, but the vitriol and callousness will persist in all its forms until the next gleeful outrage hits our algorithm.
if you enjoy my writing and want some ideas for solving systemic problems that don’t include murder, check out my book Democracy in Retrograde: How To Make Changes Big & Small In Our Country and Our Lives, instant NYT bestseller by me and
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He gives off narcissist/sociopath vibes
His lawyer is a dude from Altoona… isn’t that weird to anyone else, like uh why??