DeBonked

Bunk Tales of Online Reverie

It's that time again
Better grab your balloons and invite your friends
Seatbelts back on, yeah, strap 'em in
Look at me, everybody, I'm smilin' big
On a road right now that I can't predict
Tell me, "Tone that down, " but I can't resist
Y'all know that sound, better raise your fist
The search begins, I'm back, so enjoy the trip, huh

- The Search

Sincere apologies for the long delay since my last post. I’ve been busy with real life and, frankly, have lacked the inspiration to write. Much of that malaise derives from my growing disenchantment with our current state of affairs, particularly as it relates to online discourse.

But the arrival of a new character on the FinTwit (financial Twitter) scene got my creative juices flowing again. I also discovered a new artist during my time away, a rapper called NF whose lyrics I’ve borrowed to light our path, which readers of this blog know I’m wont to do.

NF is a good guide for this journey since his music deals a lot with mental health. His work is raw, emotional, visceral. If he could be described in a word, it would be “real”, which is apropos the moment for reasons that will soon become clear.

While the chosen lyrics help frame each section, I strongly encourage readers to watch each linked music video for the full Combat - and NF - experience.

So welcome back and buckle up. This is going to be a wild ride.

Intro

It's prolly gonna be a long journey but hey
It's worth it though
Cold world out there, kids, grab your coats
Been a minute, I know, now I'm back to roam
Lookin' for the antidote to crack the code
Pretty vivid, I admit it, I'm in classic mode

- The Search

Several years ago, beermaker Dos Equis ran a funny series of commercials starring a fictional character known as The Most Interesting Man in the World. The campaign regaled its audience with stories of incredible feats accomplished by an older, debonair gentleman in a comical takeoff of those Chuck Norris memes we all love. Like how Chuck never sleeps, he waits. How his tears can cure cancer, but he never cries. How he can do a wheelie on a unicycle and dribble a bowling ball. And so on.

Each commercial ends with Mr. Interesting telling us that he doesn’t always drink beer, but when he does, it’s Dos Equis. This has become a popular meme, with netizens playing with that tagline for comedic purposes (per the intro art to this piece).

Mr. Interesting also tells us to “Stay thirsty my friends”, a double entendre designed to encourage us to live life to its fullest while (presumably) consuming lots of Dos Equis in the process.

The fun part about these commercials is that everyone played along. We’re led to believe that drinking Dos Equis can help us achieve extraordinary things, like how we used to think as kids that a new pair of shoes could help us run faster and jump higher. None of this is true, of course. But it works as a joke because we’re all in on it.

This sets the stage for the focus of this piece, which discusses the curiosities, personalities, and pitfalls driven by the mystery that defines much of our online engagement today.

Social Media as Escapism

I don't trust the thoughts that come inside my head
I don't trust this thing that beats inside my chest
Who I am and who I wanna be cannot connect

- Why

I have a love-hate relationship with social media. It’s mostly hate with a dollop of unhealthy love. I’m not on Facebook or TikTok, and I rarely check my LinkedIn. I never post to Instagram, but peruse it a few times a day when looking to space out.

I’ve been especially active on X over the years, with a particular focus on FinTwit and geopolitics. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve grown addicted to the platform. Like how we enjoy reality television for the superiority we feel by watching others be awful, I catch a similar buzz listening to shitbirds so willingly profess their stupidity, hatred, and bigotry online.

Many of the accounts I follow and Spaces I listen to feature users that I either vehemently disagree with or downright despise. I could say I do so to challenge my priors for the sake of intellectual honesty, but it probably has more to do with a desire to feel better about myself.

It’s admittedly an unhealthy obsession. Or at least an abnormal one. Deriving twisted joy from such madness speaks to a darkness within me. As much as I’d like my preference for darkness to mirror that of Stan Druckenmiller in the investing sense, I reckon its nature is more in line with comic book bad guys.

This is more curse than blessing. I have a tendency to see the worst in people, which isn’t the most pleasant way to go about life. But it can be helpful in our new age of social media.

Apps like X serve up a daily assault on our collective intelligence, and it’s working with devastating effect. That’s because we aren’t thirsty enough to demand accountability from our online heroes. Instead, we engage in a never-ending search for quick dopamine hits while nodding along to the steady beat of confirmation bias.

Indeed, one of the things I find most striking is how easily impressed X users can be. Geopolitical Spaces are dominated by partisan fanatics, fake virologists, crypto scammers, and other dregs of society waxing philosophical on international and military affairs. FinTwit flocks to Spaces hosted by career losers who have demonstrated little ability to make money as investors in real life. These financial gurus (furus) are often laughingstocks in their field but have nonetheless managed to garner legions of impressionable fans on X.

This is because most of their audience has no idea what is going on, allowing folks with the gift of gab and some modicum of expertise to sound really smart when surrounded by hobbyists. I often equate it to JV basketball players impressing the Freshman B team with their dribbling skills while the varsity squad is out there competing in games that actually matter. It’s what we call in the business easy comps.

But at least we can see some of these furus coming. For all their faults, a few are willing to put their names to their failures, allowing us to watch them crash out in real time. Too many of us unfortunately take the wrong lessons from their experiences, but that’s more on us than them.

The bigger problem in my estimation are the anonymous accounts. The ability for us to engage from behind an avatar and a pseudonymous handle like John03897251 - or Johnny Numbers, as I like to say - is where things can get a little…weird.

Anonymity can be a feature or bug depending upon the context. On the one hand, it allows certain information or expertise to surface that would otherwise remain hidden for fear of reprisal, professional or otherwise. On the other hand, it helps hoards of faceless users protect their personal downside while propagating all manner of hate and disinformation.

This latter dynamic gives rise to something I’ve lamented before, which is a sort of inverse preference falsification. Anonymity lets us reveal our true selves from behind the safety of a screen while suppressing our darkest thoughts in real life.

Anonymity also allows us to play characters online, motivations for which can be several. We can live vicariously through a manufactured persona to either compensate for some life emptiness or simply for trolling purposes. Or we can cosplay as someone else for fun, feels or fraud (otherwise known as live action role play, or “LARP”).

I reckon these virtual alter egos run rampant on X, where the battlefield has been softened by years of disinformation campaigns designed to turn our brains to mush. We have been beaten down to mistrust our leaders, institutions, even the notion of expertise itself. And the consequences have been dire.

The mainstream media have been kneecapped in favor of “citizen journalism”, allowing a dude and his iPhone to create even bigger waves than the New York Times. Similar to how power vacuums develop in geopolitics, a similar legitimacy vacuum has arisen on the back of our war on expertise. This allows bad actors to occupy new high ground on that battlefield of ideas, deploying weapons-grade nonsense that has us believing crazy shit like Hitler being one of the good guys of World War II.

The prevalence of Dunning-Kruger on social media is therefore unsurprising. Propagandists, hucksters, creeps, and thieves flood the zone with misinformation while catering to our urge to understand and believe. This allows for the promulgation of all manner of bullshit so long as we find the content engaging and appealing. We superficially experience ourselves becoming smarter in the process - because we need to feel that way - which emboldens us to opine on things well beyond our purview.

These bad actors feast on our primal instincts to belong, to be heard, to be respected. In reality, they are feeding off of our collective ignorance. Most of us are expert at a few things and inexpert at many others. And those blind spots form the perfect attack vector in our social media age.

Despite my routine condemnation of this dynamic, I fall prey to it as well. I often comment on geopolitical issues when I have no formal training in the space. Why should anyone care what I have to say on such matters? They shouldn’t. Yet I nonetheless feel compelled to offer my two cents because I’ve been led to think I know what I’m talking about.

Some explanation is warranted as to my own motivation for being anonymous. I started this Substack back in 2021, roundabout when the New York Times doxxed a popular blogger who published under the pen name Slade Star Codex. I recall thinking it was pretty cool that someone had organically built a devoted following through their writing without the help of pedigree or backing.

I came close to doxxing myself a little while back to demonstrate my indifference to the idea of being discovered. Everyone who matters to me in life - professional and personal - knows my nom de guerre. And anyone managing to discover my true identity would probably greet that revelation with an anticlimactic shrug while thinking, “Yeah, that makes sense.” But I was convinced by friends to keep my identity under wraps to maintain the mystery of it all. So that’s what I’ve done.

I don’t flaunt my wealth, gains, or stature. I don’t consider myself special. Anyone who follows me can attest to my self-deprecating approach to markets and investing. Despite roughly 25 years of real experience in alternative investing - mostly on the liquid, marketable side - I make no claim to excellence when it comes to trading.

In fact, unlike the blowhards holding court every day on Spaces, my actual, lived experience has taught me that none of us has an edge in these markets. Encouraging folks to avoid day trading in favor of dollar cost averaging into a cheap index ETF is about the extent of the financial advice I dispense.

My approach stands in stark contrast to the behavior of many others on X, where it’s easy to find feeds dominated by anons engaged in a digital chest-thumping competition. Users are locked in a perpetual battle of oneupmanship, desperate to prove how rich, strong, and smart they are. Many such users get a little too caught up in all the peacocking, often making ridiculous claims that are conveniently impossible to confirm given their anonymity.

Let’s get to know one of the most egregious examples of this phenomenon.

The Most Interesting Man on FinTwit

When I grow up, I just want to pay my bills
Rappin' 'bout the way I feel, oh yeah
I just want to make a couple mil'
Leave it to the fam in the will, oh yeah
I just want to sign a record deal
Maybe buy a house up in the hills, oh yeah
Might not be the best in my field
But I guarantee that I'ma die real

- When I Grow Up

Whatever the motivation, there is a lot of playacting across social media, with X being a hotbed of such fuckery. The app is a petri dish of fakery, manipulation, and abuse. It was bad enough before Elon Musk took over, and he’s only made it decidedly worse.

Which brings us to the star of this little show, an X user with the handle @bonkdacarnivore who goes by the name Bonk.

As a natural cynic, especially when it comes to all things X, my default position is to be skeptical of any grand claims made online. And it is my estimation that Bonk is the king of such grandiosity by a country mile, even despite the stiff competition. This is why he shall henceforth be referred to as Bunk, as I believe much of what he says is “complete nonsense, or something that is meant to deceive”.

I first discovered Bunk when happening upon a Space he held back in February. It was entitled “Open Office Hour with Bonk” and mostly featured him fielding questions at random. I stumbled in towards the end, just in time to catch one of the most batshit craziest statements I’ve ever heard. It was around the 57-minute mark when he stated the following:

For me personally, because my portfolio is so wide, that I have to be in everything. I’m in global currency markets, I’m in global equity markets, I’m constantly selling contracts against equity that I have…I assume most of the people who follow me have relatively small portfolios…If we’re being blunt, my day trading account is $26 billion…My portfolio exists outside the realms of normal reality.

I didn’t pay the guy much mind at the time, chalking him up as another of these silly stock tip posers who are more salesmen than traders, most of whom are anonymous for a reason. But he kept popping up in the geopolitical Spaces I frequent and began making his way into those never-ending FinTwit trading Spaces as well.

So I started to pay closer attention, listening to more of his Spaces and observing the behavior of those around him. It quickly became clear that he had managed to convince a lot of people that he was a real-life billionaire willing to slum it with the rest of us online. He is routinely feted as an expert on damn near everything and can often be heard holding forth on a range of topics while rudely dismissing those brave enough to challenge his narratives.

Any pushback would see Bunk quickly respond with a snarky, condescending reply and a block (or yeet, as he calls it). That eventually included some of my buddies, which at least partially served as motivation for this post.

In my years of observing charlatans on X, a quick block is one of the telltale signs of tomfoolery. Despite their tough guy personas, these dudes tend to be softer than baby shit. That’s because their games only allow for offense to be played. Their defenses are virtually nonexistent - which tends to be the case when you’ve built a house of cards - so they quickly hide behind a block to keep accountability at bay.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s return to our man of the moment.

It’s hard to know where to begin when introducing our own little Mr. Interesting. Maybe it’s best to let Bunk describe himself to us in his own words.

Let’s start with his X bio to kick things off.

He’s originally from Connecticut.

He received his first degree as a teenager.

He went on to collect many more degrees, and the public considers him an impressive figure.

Four of his degrees are in computer science, biochemistry, physics, and economics from MIT, making him the epitome of educated.

His PhD is also in economics from MIT, along with a few other advanced degrees, including an MBA.

About that bar number, he holds a JD from Cornell.

He hates credentialism…

…but doesn’t miss an opportunity to remind us about his many degrees, which apparently make him the world’s most intellectually dangerous person.

He was an engineer at some point.

He was a Search-and-Rescue pilot in the Coast Guard too, and met his wife after saving one of her family members. Together, they would go on to build a legendary empire.

His wife is a vascular surgeon, by the way.

He founded a venture capital (VC) firm that now has over $30 billion in assets under management (AUM).

He retired from his uber successful VC firm to go back to the corporate world so he could spend more time with his family. As one does.

That’s because he’s a great dad.

Speaking of dads, his was a rocket scientist. And he comes from a long line of warfighters.

He raised four great kids while creating tens of thousands of jobs in the process.

His kids are super smart. Among the older siblings, one is at CalTech…

…and the other is at Duke after telling Harvard to fuck off.

They speak Mandarin too.

He became the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for a major tech company upon returning to the corporate world.

He even had that in his bio for a minute.

He’s very proud to have been a C-suite executive, which means he doesn’t have to grift.

He was so good at his job that Elon wanted to chat with him about becoming X CISO.

He made well into the six figures in 2023, is over six-feet tall, and has at least a six-inch penis.

He’s 6’3” to be exact, which makes him taller than JD Vance.

He’s built like a Viking (also mentioned on a Spaces where he said he’s 6’4”).

That’s because he’s half Viking. And descended from an American forefather.

He was almost good enough to go pro in hockey. And he’s not a dweeb.

We therefore shouldn’t be surprised that he has abnormally high testosterone.

He’s a captain of industry, even in retirement.

He’s smarter than Albert Einstein, which is extremely rare.

He’s one of the wealthiest men on the planet and there are cities named after him.

There were maybe 30 people in the world richer than him in late 2024, wealth derived from early crypto investments and the venture capital firm he founded. He also earned a salary of “only” about $2 million, which I suppose qualifies as well into the six figures (per his earlier post).

Being this rich makes him worth 11 figures. Heck, he’s almost worth $100 billion.

His crypto bag is so heavy because he was an OG bitcoin investor.

And he now holds more crypto than Microstrategy.

He owns 25 acres in Aspen along with over 30 other properties.

Make that over 100 properties across all 50 states.

His main ones are in Southern California, Aspen, Montana, and Tampa.

His Tampa compound has a helipad.

In addition to a private landing strip.

For his three planes.

He doesn’t want to talk about the fancy one, but he will if he has to.

He couldn’t afford a top-of-the-line Falcon 7X last year…

…but looks like he can now.

Actually, make that four planes.

He’s a certified divemaster.

He’s a bladesmith, so he has a weapon room.

He also has multiple game rooms furnished with fancy tables.

That’s because he’s really into board games.

He has 22 bodyguards.

He’s got historical recall (referred to as “near perfect” on Spaces).

His family owns a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

That may explain why he’s an incredible trader. The best in the world, actually.

He had a 98% hit rate last year.

Nobody has a higher hit rate than him, doncha know.

Because he has a crystal ball, apparently.

Which I guess is why he’s never wrong.

This isn’t meant to serve as an exhaustive list, but it should be sufficient for our purposes here.

Individually, many of these claims are outlandish enough to spontaneously combust upon contact with any scrutiny. Collectively, it’s a virtual guarantee that this character is a figment of someone’s very active imagination.

Even the OG Mr. Interesting himself would struggle to believe this shit.

Now comes the fun part.

Dude Diligence

What's my definition of success?
Creating something no one else can
It's a person that would never waver
Or change who they are
Just to try and gain some credibility
So they could feel accepted by a stranger

- Hope

There’s a brilliant scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds in which Michael Fassbender’s British character impersonates a member of the German SS while visiting a tavern in German-occupied France. It’s a wonderful sequence in the film, marked by extreme tension as the British spy works to convince his fellow drinkers that he is, in fact, one of their own.

Fassbender’s character acquits himself well, navigating the tense dialogue with aplomb. But he eventually gives himself away when he orders a round of beers by holding up three fingers in a manner inconsistent with the German style. What followed was a trademark Tarantino bloodbath.

This has become a popular meme when calling bullshit on someone online. And those of us paying attention encounter many such three-finger moments when weeding through Bunk’s bold proclamations.

Let’s review a few of those curiosities, inconsistencies and inaccuracies below.

The obvious place to start is the laughable assertion that Bunk is worth nearly $100 billion. He’s talked about how Elon has 3-4x his wealth and how there are only 30 or so people in the world wealthier than him. Per the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, that would rank him somewhere within this list.

It’s safe to say that none of these people are bragging about their day trading skills on X all day. It feels like I should just stop here, but where’s the fun in that?

Let’s play the game anyway.

So we’ve got the $26 billion trading portfolio plus a crypto portfolio that must be worth at least $60 billion if it is indeed larger than Strategy’s (fka Microstrategy, $MSTR) bitcoin holdings. Add to that an extensive real estate portfolio and stake in his former venture capital firm, and I suppose that’s what has Bunk pushing twelve figures in net worth.

This assertion can be easily debunked on comps alone. Think of some of the most successful venture capitalists in America, many of whom have sizable crypto holdings themselves. Peter Thiel’s estimated net worth is approximately $20 billion. Reid Hoffman comes in at around $2.5 billion and Marc Andreesen at about $2 billion. But Bunk wants us to believe he’s managed to compile a nest egg multiples their size?

For the sake of completeness, I ran Bunk’s claimed background by a few friends in the venture capital business, including partners at major firms. After they were done guffawing at the description, I was assured that there is no way in hell such a person exists. It’s important to note here that venture investing is very much a people business, making it virtually impossible for someone to accumulate any meaningful amount of wealth in that space without everyone knowing about it.

But let’s keep playing.

Bunk claims that his old firm manages $30 billion today. Well, there are currently only four VC firms in America whose AUM approximates that amount: Andreesen Horowitz (or a16z), General Catalyst, Sequoia, and Dragoneer.

None of these groups’ founders remotely match Bunk’s description. In fact, each of their founding partners are either: 1) Deceased; 2) Remain active in the businesses they founded; or 3) Have left to start new firms of their own.

Seeking other clues, Bunk tells us that his old firm is presently run by a minority. With a minority CEO and Chairman, General Catalyst comes close. But three of its four founding partners remain actively involved in the business, with the fourth having left to start his own firm.

Moving on to crypto. Despite the ostensibly secretive nature of the asset class, the big players are well known. A $60 billion crypto portfolio would not only be impossible to hide, but would rank him second in size only to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin (an argument can be made that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao ranks up there as well). Let’s just save ourselves some time by taking for granted that Bunk doesn’t hold anywhere near this amount of crypto.

Next comes the real estate bit. According to ChatGPT, there is no record of a private individual owning real estate across all 50 states. We can’t dismiss this claim with certainty given the decentralized nature of such recordkeeping, but it’s probably safe to err on the side of skepticism here too.

Lastly, let’s tackle the assertion that Bunk has a $26 billion day trading portfolio.

Much of what the man says betrays a naiveté about how the world works, and this is a great example. The logistics associated with managing a portfolio of this size are daunting and the resources required significant. You would need a sizable team of analysts, execution traders, risk managers, and operational professionals just to help wrangle everything, not to mention the legal and compliance oversight inevitably required. We’re talking thousands of line items here. Add to that institutional grade custody solutions, algorithmic trading capabilities, and prime brokerage services that would prove crucial to managing a book of that size.

Think about similarly-sized hedge funds. Take Balyasny as an example, a $25 billion multi-strategy investment group. The firm has more than 1700 investment professionals spread across over 20 offices, all in service of managing a portfolio of roughly equal size.

Yet Bunk wants us to believe he can manage this all on his own with the help of that handy dandy Bloomberg terminal he so proudly flaunts?

As an aside, the real ones don’t brag about having a Bloomberg terminal because it’s table stakes for any serious investment operation. But a LARP certainly would. And rather than spell out “Bloomberg Terminal” all the time, we simply refer to it as BBG.

In any event, the notion that a dude and his “Bloomberg Terminal” can singlehandedly manage a $26 billion trading book is laugh-out-loud bonkers (pun!). Especially if trading across a handful of retail platforms that are not built to handle such flow. He’s demonstrating real ignorance about market microstructure here.

Ninja’s latest regulatory filing shows total client assets of only about $250 million. Clearly too small for Bunk’s size. Interactive Brokers (IB) is much larger at roughly $150 billion in total assets on its platform. IB has the operational capacity to handle a $10-$20 billion portfolio, but it would bump up against severe limitations. Not to mention any savvy investor of size would want to diversify their counterparty risk across multiple service providers rather than just the two listed here.

The bottom line is it would require a serious operation to manage a portfolio of Bunk’s purported size. This is why family offices are a thing, many of which make heavy use of third-party fund managers for the heavy lifting. And I can’t imagine someone operating within such a complex setup would wince at the added hassle of getting monetized on X.

There are other clues worth noting.

Bunk started his X account back in 2010, but we don’t have much to go on until around 2022. A visit to the Wayback Machine only scraped a few posts during the intervening period, with the one below proving interesting enough.

Our captain of industry was excited to have won an Xbox One at auction twelve years ago? It would be reasonable to expect that someone of his stature would’ve been well on his way by then, making a video game station an easy, throwaway purchase. I mean, we all enjoy free stuff, I guess. But most billionaires aren’t bragging about winning small-time auctions to randos online.

I also wouldn’t expect one of the world’s richest people to be talked out of a work sabbatical because he needs to put his kids through college.

Nor would I expect them to submit to having to deal with employers telling them what to do - like get the COVID vaccine - and consider $30,000 “pricey” for standing up to authority…

…or spend their time house-hunting in relative slums.

Which reminds me. The idea that a billionaire venture capital titan would leave a magic money machine of his own creation to work for someone else as CISO is completely bizarre. I mean, can you imagine Peter Thiel dropping everything to become a cybersecurity executive at Microsoft? All to spend more time with his family? Once you achieve such heights, you make your own schedule. You’re in the catbird seat and answer to no one.

It makes no fucking sense.

Let’s briefly turn our focus to his legendary status as a trader.

It’s difficult to ascertain when his account turned furu, but it looks to have been sometime towards the end of 2023. Up until that point, he was mostly making fun of woke headlines before getting caught up in politics by supporting the presidential aspirations of Florida governor Ron Desantis. This sees him catch a lot of heat from the MAGA crowd, though it appears he didn’t always dislike Trump.

It’s funny watching him attempt to deny his furu status while continuously - and I guess unintentionally - staking claim to it. He has written long posts lambasting “FinTwit guys” and complaining about frauds scamming people with trading Discords and other paid services. Meanwhile, the dude is constantly talking up his own book, and has even started an X community called “Bonkiversity” for people to come and learn at the feet of the great one. All free of charge…for now, at least.

The expectation is that we’ll all flock to his feed because apparently this fucking guy just does not miss. He had a 98% hit rate last year (referenced above) and was damn near undefeated this year through April.

There is precisely zero chance his trading record comes anywhere close to the astronomical winning percentage he claims. Putting aside the high frequency guys, the best traders in the world would be delighted to achieve a hit rate of 55%. Maybe even 60% in a truly phenomenal year. But Bunk wants us to believe that he routinely registers success rates north of 95%?

He and his simps will tell you that everything is there to see on his timeline. Our guy is all about transparency, after all. But good luck to anyone wading through his thousands of posts to arrive at anything resembling a coherent track. Many of his public trades are either lauded in retrospect or lack follow-through.

We saw an example of this just yesterday when Bunk wanted everyone on a political Space to know that he had purchased some Tesla puts in the morning, just in time to enjoy the stock’s ensuing selloff stemming from ratcheting Musk-Trump tensions. Of course, there is no evidence of this on his timeline, proving once again that Hindsight Capital remains undefeated.

What he’s banking on here is not just our collective ignorance but our laziness too. He knows nobody is going to take the time to audit his timeline for every callout. But even our cursory attempts to do so yield little results. The few trades we can see are hit or miss, and anyone with a rudimentary understanding of how to read an options chain will know that much of his claimed activity doesn’t add up.

But we can slay this beast by keeping it super high level. He noted in the aforementioned Office Hour Space that it took him the better part of last year to earn his first billion in trading profits. With a claimed $26 billion trading book coming into 2025, that would translate to a return of just ~4% in 2024, which compares to a blended return of about 25% for U.S. equity markets. Even if we generously assume he hit the home stretch hard by doubling those profits, he still dramatically underperformed the indices.

How do we reconcile that with his claimed 98% hit rate?

We can’t.

Moving on to his aggressive academic credentials, we can keep this one brief too. There is no one in America who comes close to matching the educational background he claims. Even playing around with different schools, no one comes within shouting distance of the degree combination he has claimed. That’s based on public information, so it’s possible I’m missing something. But I’m willing to bet I’m not.

Bunk says his ability to stack degrees was facilitated by having a triple major in college and the advent of distance learning. While MIT no longer allows triple majors, I’ve seen some chatter suggesting that it was possible up until 2003, which would seem to track with his purported timeline.

But a search for “the most educated MIT student ever” reveals stories about a gentleman named Tue Nguyen, who at seven degrees is known to be the school’s most credentialed graduate in history. I’ll go out on a limb here and assume that Bunk is not a 63-year old Vietnamese refugee.

MIT only began offering credit for distance learning around 2016. Unless most of his degrees came while he was already a VC titan, this doesn’t check out either.

Let’s pick this scab a bit more to further demonstrate Bunk’s tendency to either get things wrong (which he claims to never do), state mistruths, or sound downright silly.

Returning to that Office Hour Space provides some quick hitters.

Around the 15-minute mark, he notes that bitcoin is going into crypto winter (BTC is +20% since then). And that the March and April non-farm payroll numbers were going to be “so bad” (both prints were strong). He also said, “I think we’re officially in what I call stagflation”, like a commonly used economic term is a word unique to him or something.

In another three-fingered salute, Bunk stated that “currency markets are always a great place to go and hide” during times of uncertainty. Again, this isn’t how a real one talks. Macro trading vernacular doesn’t make much use of the term “currency markets”. Instead, we trade FX (foreign exchange). And anyone who trades FX knows that “currency markets” are more volatile than their equity counterparts, especially in times of stress.

He also noted that the average trader isn’t “going to be interested in the currency exchanges.” I suppose that’s technically true since there is no such thing as a currency exchange. That’s because FX transacts over-the-counter (OTC), meaning trades occur directly between counterparties rather than through centralized exchanges.

Shall we continue?

Bunk made more wayward claims on a Space hosted by another user on May 16, 2025. While discussing the recent Moody’s downgrade of U.S. government debt, Bunk shared with us the following:

The Fed is not going to lower rates to try and get bond market yields down. They don’t care. That’s not their job. Their job is monetary offset policy. The role of Capitol Hill is fiscal policy. Capitol Hill cares about 10-year yields. Jerome Powell does not care one iota!

The chutzpah is breathtaking here. First of all, I have no idea what “monetary offset policy” means. And to suggest that Congress - most of whose members haven’t a clue how rates work - cares more about the Treasury market than the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve is asinine. This is something a charlatan would say while trying to sound smart about monetary policy, someone who derives their knowledge from Google to confirm that the Fed operates with a myopic dual mandate to the neglect of everything else.

But he says it with such authority, so it must be true! This reminds me of some marketing advice I received years ago, about the magic not being in the details but in the presentation of those details.

In reality, the Fed is hyper focused on the 10-year because it’s a benchmark funding rate and transmission mechanism for inflation expectations, which is front-of-mind for Chairman Powell and his fellow Fed governors. He is constantly talking about ensuring that the Treasury market function smoothly to avoid a spike in rates.

Let’s check with Powell himself for clarity on the issue. Here’s a snippet from a speech he gave back in September 2024:

It is essential that our Treasury markets are able to efficiently transform Treasury securities into cash, even at times of elevated stress. As I noted at this event in 2015, "these markets need to keep functioning at a high level, and we all have a stake in making sure that they do." I remain wholly dedicated to that goal.

Bunk also stepped in it by suggesting that large institutional investors would now be prohibited from holding U.S. government debt due to the downgrade because they are mandated to only hold AAA-rated securities - another remarkably amateur take.

First, most institutional allocators have no such mandate. Why would they hamstring themselves like that? They wouldn’t. And they don’t.

Second, anyone who has actually dealt with this stuff knows that it doesn’t matter what Moody’s says about America’s credit quality because Treasury securities are considered risk-free by default given our safe haven status. That may change over time, but Basel still assigns a 0% risk weighting to our debt, which is effectively all that matters if you’re an allocator. Besides, if Treasurys don’t qualify as risk-free, what does these days?

Notice too how he said he “owns” a venture capital firm. He does this with some regularity. Again, this isn’t how a real one talks. We refer to ourselves as “founders” or “founding partners”. We “founded” an investment management business, or maybe we “run” a hedge fund, venture capital firm, etc. We never say we “own” it. That’s just tacky, largely because these firms are typically structured as partnerships with equity handed out to key employees who together “own” the firm in the collective.

His post here regarding the carried interest tax loophole is another example of how he trades on the ignorance of his audience.

The carried interest loophole allows private fund managers to see the revenue they generate from incentive fees treated as long-term investment gains, which are subject to a 20% tax rate (plus a possible 3.8% net investment income tax). This in contrast to the management fees that these firms generate, which are treated as ordinary income and therefore subject to a higher tax rate of up to 37%. That delta between long-term gains and ordinary tax treatment is what Bunk claims to be benefiting from here.

Bunk is running with the notion that he retains an equity stake in the fabulously successful VC firm that he founded…and later abandoned…to return to the corporate world…so he could spend more time with his family. Again, as one does.

Let’s operate under the assumption that his old firm manages $30 billion in total AUM. And let’s further assume that the firm has launched funds on a typical cadence, achieves results in line with industry averages, and carries a standard fee structure.

In this imaginary scenario, said VC firm could be expected to generate somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-$500 million in annual incentive fees. This would represent the entire gross performance fee generated by that business, which means that Bunk wants us to believe that his savings alone would effectively equate to the entire annual incentive clip for a firm he no longer runs.

Even if we operated under the optimistic assumption that his old firm crushed some deals and massively outperformed - say, doubling its incentive income to $1 billion - the resultant savings afforded to the entire firm would still only be about $170 million.

Even more to the point, there isn’t a fund manager on the planet who knows how much they’ll make in incentive fees in a given calendar year as early as May of that same year. That’s because there are seven months remaining for gains to either vanish or be harvested.

So unless our guy retains ownership stakes in multiple private fund ventures that generate super predictable incentive streams - which I’m sure he would’ve bragged about by now - this claim makes no logical sense.

In a Space hosted by a separate X user on May 20, 2025, Bunk delivered another obvious flub. Around the 29-minute mark, he wanders into hedge fund territory by stating that:

Citadel…got stopped out of their long positions [in Tesla] because it fell so far so fast…they ended up leveraged way too heavily short and we had a violent relief rally and they were positioned in the wrong direction on that because they got stopped out of their longs right at the bottom…so they took a one-two punch which is…leaving them skittish right now, they’re not …I don’t think there’s a lot of appetite to put a lot of risk on the table long and short…ahead of their next quarterly bonus evaluation.

Bunk clearly has no idea what he’s talking about here. First off, good luck following the purported price action. Citadel got stopped out of its shorts and then got stopped out of its longs? In the same name? I suppose the implication here is that Citadel was chasing and got whipsawed, for which Bunk of course has zero evidence.

Second, Citadel’s flagship fund, Wellington, is incredibly diversified. Thousands of line items are managed by dozens of trading teams (or pods) spread across multiple strategies and geographies. Hell, the firm’s latest 13F shows over 14,000 positions.

Third, like many of its pod shop peers, Citadel runs a market neutral strategy. Among the key differentiators for these firms is their ability to manage risk, and Citadel is known to have one of the most sophisticated risk management programs on the planet. Its risk team is comprised of dozens of people whose nerve center is reminiscent of the control room of the USS Starship Enterprise. It’s often the case that multiple positions in the same name are spread across these various pods, all of which is centrally monitored at the risk level to ensure some degree of neutrality.

So the idea that a single name would leave this battleship “skittish” is patently absurd.

Lastly, Citadel - like damn near every other hedge fund on the planet - pays out its bonuses on an annual basis. That’s because incentive fees are crystallized at the end of each calendar year. There is thusly no such thing as a “quarterly bonus evaluation”. In all my years in the hedge fund business, I’ve yet to come across a single fund that would attempt such a feat (outside of some silly crypto ones I’ve seen along the way).

Let’s now discuss Bunk’s claim about Wall Street legend Marty Zweig being his mentor. This assertion also feels bogus for reasons practical and logical, clearly designed to bridge the gap between how a venture capitalist is somehow also a master day trader.

Zweig passed away in 2013. Bunk claims to be in his mid-40s, which on a standard timeframe would mean he entered the workforce sometime around the year 2000. But we’ve been told that Bunk had a habit of stacking degrees. Eight to be exact, including a PhD in Economics from MIT and a JD from Cornell. Earning that PhD and JD would typically take 5-6 years and 2-3 years of full-time study, respectively. Even with the claim of receiving his first degree at the tender age of 18, he still had a healthy amount of study left according to the profile he claims. This on top of his time in the Coast Guard, where his claim to have been a Search-and-Rescue helicopter pilot would’ve required another 2-3 years of training.

Let’s generously assume a super compressed timeframe that saw him emerge from his 20s fully credentialed as a promiscuous academic and Coast Guard veteran by the year 2010. This would leave him all of three years to study under one of the all-time greats. But we’re told that Bunk started his venture capital firm in Seattle sometime before the year 2009, which I believe is roughly when he moved from there to Los Angeles. Around this time, Zweig was battling liver cancer from his home in Fisher Island.

Why would a famed but ailing equity trader take under his wing someone who must have been a budding venture capitalist at the time? Mentors tend to have something in common with their mentees, most often working together at the same firm. It’s unclear why their personal or educational backgrounds might overlap, and venture is on the opposite side of the investing spectrum when compared to the liquid trading strategies Zweig employed. It would be like a young Marc Andreesen being mentored by Jim Simons, or Ken Griffin by Don Valentine.

Again, it makes no fucking sense.

I’ve heard Bunk describe Marty as a first ballot hedge fund hall of famer. Well, as someone who grew up at one of the OG multi-strategy investment firms and whose mentor is actually a member of the hedge fund hall of fame, allow me to feign similar outrage at some anon touting such tutelage online.

I must admit that it’s hard to keep up with all of the bollocks. Bunk routinely missteps on matters serious and trivial, offering a plethora of moments rich with irony. Researching this piece had me feeling a ton of secondhand embarrassment for the guy.

His over-the-top bravado betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the billionaire mind. Bunk’s commentary is awkwardly melodramatic, dripping with insecurity while revealing naiveté about how the world he claims to occupy really operates.

I am by no means a billionaire myself. Like most of us, I’m impossibly far from ever becoming one. But I’ve spent a good chunk of my career knee-deep in that part of society. And the handful of billionaires that I actually know often do live lavish lifestyles, but they also tend to be intensely private.

Their displays of wealth are not designed for the proletariat - many of whom recoil at their ostentatiousness - and are instead directed towards their wealthy peers. It’s keeping up with the Joneses, Hamptons style. That’s because real billionaires compete with each other, not with us. These people are way too busy making money and memories in real life to flex to us plebes all day. The quote about the lion not concerning itself with the opinions of sheep comes to mind here.

But not Bunk! He’s here to mix it up with us peons while giving zero fucks, talking tough as an anon “who isn’t afraid of cancellation”.

That’s because he’s got “fuck you money”, so he does what he wants, which appears to involve talking copious amounts of shit while hiding behind a cartoon avatar.

Surely I’m not the only one who finds this curious. I mean, the entire point of “fuck you money” is to be your true prickly self with no concern for consequence. Being fabulously wealthy is quite the deterrent, but you can’t call yourself bulletproof if nobody knows where to shoot. So despite his protestations to the contrary, I reckon Bunk is actually quite afraid of blowback.

Now this is what “fuck you money” really looks like:

He laughs at follower counts…

…when the Wayback Machine shows him having just 254 followers 13 years after starting his own account.

He retired at 29 years old as a lowly wage earner…

…and then again in his mid-40s as a captain of industry. I guess?

He talks about firework displays that he hosts at his Aspen compound every Memorial Day weekend - including this past one - when I have confirmation from the Aspen fire chief that no such shows were allowed or scheduled during that time (we’re told this year’s show was canceled due to wind). When confronted with the notion that such shows are illegal, he tells us not to worry.

He talks about trading on the floor of the NYSE as an individual investor because of a longstanding family membership. But no such activity is allowed. And I thought his parents didn’t have any money?

Speaking of parents, Bunk has a perfect credit score because his got him a credit card at the age of three. This is something else that would put him in rarefied air since just 1.5% of all Americans have such a score. And it’s illegal for infants to be issued credit cards, so he’s either lying here or admitting to identity fraud.

Let’s see. What else?

Oh, there is no record of a newly-built private residential helipad or landing strip anywhere near Tampa. The last time something like this was attempted, it made local headlines and was eventually denied.

I could keep going, but we’ve been at this long enough already. This could literally turn into a running blog that documents all the man’s many contradictions in real time. But I actually have better things to do - believe it or not!

If you haven’t seen it by now, god help you.

Outro

They cover they heads up whenever I drop
Shake the whole industry, put 'em in shock
Come out the clouds like a meteor rock
Then land on the Earth like, "Ready or not?"

- Clouds

Bunk and I share some things in common. His approach to the absurd is similar to my own, with takedowns often delivered in condescending, sardonic fashion. He’s smart, observant, and articulate, all attributes I fully embrace.

But the asshole he plays online goes quite a bit further than me. I too am an asshole. Like Bunk, I’m judgmental, self-righteous, and don’t suffer fools. But he treats X as bloodsport, like a game where the objective is not just to inflict damage on your opponent but to slaughter them. He is highly disrespectful - especially to women and the “poors” - and definitely not shy with the vulgarity.

But I think this is all an act. It is my contention that Bunk has spun a web of lies, each more outlandish than the last, emboldened by the sycophancy of the easily impressed and silence of the rest of us.

I mean, come on folks. He’s very obviously full of shit. Bunk’s many claims don’t just strain credulity, they torture it.

The question in my mind is why, for which I have a few working hypotheses:

1. Bunk is a professional shapeshifter working on a long con.

2. Bunk is actually a bored, wealthy retiree of provenance unknown.

3. Bunk is a mediocre executive with an active imagination who is taking out his frustrations online.

You’ll notice none of these theories involves him being anything close to the character he portrays. That’s because I’m trying to be realistic here.

One can be forgiven for settling on option #1. This very well could be a shaping operation as part of a windup for a paid service of some sort. Despite his many protestations against the idea of monetization, we all know there is no honor among tweeps. Besides, there isn’t much downside to misleading your followers these days anyway.

He does protest an awful lot, though. Just search his timeline for the word “monetize” and see for yourself.

Bunk recently directed his followers to a small private trading Discord of one of his “students”. Could this be part of a feeder program? Could that Discord actually be run by him, despite his many protestations to the contrary?

Possibly.

This is reminiscent of a situation that developed over on geopolitical X where a certain character arrived on the scene and quickly ingratiated himself with some of the larger accounts. He went by the name BZ and had everyone convinced he was a constitutional scholar of some sort. He talked a good game and even had me assuming he was in fact a legal expert (made possible by my own ignorance on such matters, of course). It was later revealed that he was a professional fraudster named Darko Johanovich who had fleeced some unassuming users for tens of thousands of dollars. You can read more about that story here.

It’s possible we have a modern day Frank Abagnale on our hands. But I don’t think Bunk is a pro, largely because he’s just not very good at it. I mean, if you want to create a persona in pursuit of manufactured legitimacy, at least make your story somewhat believable. But, as illustrated in brief above, there is so much garbage associated with his many claims that it doesn’t just border on absurdity, it has reached the heights of it. Rather than the Gatsby-esque character he wants us to see him as, he instead just sounds so…pathetic.

Option #2 stands a reasonable chance of being true as well. I could see someone familiar with social media and with lots of time on their hands choosing to take a piss online. Maybe as a social experiment or form of performance art just to see how far they can take the charade.

But my vote is option #3.

Though not very clever, Bunk is clearly intelligent. He may be an autist of sorts with some degree of the “historical recall” he claims. Or he could simply be adept at using AI chatbots while participating in Spaces. Either way, he’s admittedly good at sounding smart.

But I don’t think much of anything he has claimed about his background is true. To be fair, some obfuscation is par for the course when looking to remain hidden. A white lie here and there for purposes of misdirection can’t hurt too much. I have done this myself. While everything I’ve represented about my background is directionally accurate, some key variables have been fudged in order to throw folks off my scent. Bunk admits that he’s done something similar.

I reckon the phrase “basically honest enough” is doing real work here. In fact, I suspect the overwhelming majority of what he’s told us about himself is complete fabrication. I reckon our guy shifted his timeline more than “juuuuuust enough”, but still not quite enough for those of us with a certain set of skills.

If I were to attempt a character sketch of the real life Bunk, I imagine the following isn’t too far off. Keep in mind that this is all speculation. It’s entirely possible that I could be dead wrong in my assessment of the man. But let’s give it a go anyway, just for shits and giggles.

It’s pretty easy to start with the assumption that he is most definitely not a billionaire, much less anywhere close to “pushing 12 figures”. He’s probably in his late-50s rather than the mid-40s he’s guided towards. His voice alone gives that away, along with his tendency to double space after each period. He’s not quite retired, probably still gainfully employed. But instead of the C-Suite title he often brandishes, he holds an unglamorous job at a large technology company. He has precisely zero background in venture capital and has never held the role of CISO, but his job has endowed him with an ability to speak fluently on the tech industry.

Marty Zweig certainly never heard of the guy, but he’s an intelligent fellow who could be a quick study. Maybe his “historical recall” allows him to retain enough information to sound smart to amateurs online. But instead of his ridiculous claim to eight degrees, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn he lacks any academic pedigree at all.

Instead of stints in Los Angeles, Aspen, and Tampa, I reckon he’s spent most of his adult life in the Pacific Northwest, where he still lives. Perhaps within shouting distance of Seattle, perhaps nestled in the foothills of a mountain range nearby. Not the Mercer Island fancy he claims but a lovely home nonetheless.

Maybe instead of being a vascular surgeon, his wife performs a similar role at the same large tech company he works at, which could be how they met. Despite the stories Bunk shares to make him look like a good dad, he may not even have kids, allowing him and his wife to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle as older DINKs.

Rather than the $2 million+ he claims in annual compensation, Bunk’s combined annual household income is probably less than $500,000. This provides a good life, and could be supplemented by crypto gains and/or stock options from said large technology company.

Instead of the Viking physicality he’s used to describe himself, he presents as more of the nerdy dad bod variety. Not short per se, but not over 6-feet either. And outside of a few small Norwegian settlements, there are no cities that bear his family name.

His penchant for fantastical claims speaks to an overactive imagination, one shaped by a lifetime of science fiction and playing make-believe to escape reality in some form. We know he’s a fan of board games, and he makes regular use of terms like “hit points”, calls his students “padawan”, and teaches them the ways of “The Force”.

He speaks and acts the way someone who doesn’t understand how the rich and powerful speak and act. He thinks these people are assholes, so he behaves like one. He thinks they brag about their riches, so he does so in kind. It’s pure caricature.

I wouldn’t assign nefariousness as motivation for his online antics. Instead, I think he’s caught himself up in a super involved form of cosplay. As much as we throw the term around, I reckon this is a real life case of LARPing. He’s become a bit of a method actor in the process, consumed by the role in the same way Daniel Day-Lewis insisted on being called Mr. President throughout filming of the movie Lincoln.

This post from the other day gives away the game in my opinion. Once we get past the comical assertion that his “security team” conducts a threat assessment on everyone he regularly engages with online (LMFAO), Bunk proceeds to present a version of himself to us. Just like he uses his family as props for his storytelling, here too he’s using this Sidis guy to indirectly describe what he considers himself to be.

I reckon the real life Bunk has never held a high profile job and is not a man of great repute. The tragedy that is his life story is one of untapped potential. He thinks he’s the smartest person in every room he enters, which means surely he could’ve accomplished all these great things if given the chance. The many superlatives he’s given to his alter ego all apply to Bunk in some alternative universe, which is the one he’s created for us on X.

This is why he rushes to defend his friend when someone insultingly calls him a janitor. Bunk knows he also ranks low on the professional totem pole, making an insult of this variety also an affront to his own person. So he feels compelled to remind us that nobodies can be super smart too, all in defense of himself.

We should therefore remain open to the possibility that Bunk’s condition could be pathological. Compulsive lying, histrionic personality disorder, and grandiose narcissism all come to mind in my amateur assessment.

This paints an unflattering picture of our proclaimed “captain of industry”, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the cesspool that has become X.

But again, I could be wildly off base. After all, I’m just spitballing here.

It’ll be interesting to see how Bunk responds to this piece. He makes a habit of threatening people who challenge him, likely a defense mechanism designed to discourage folks from trying to solve his riddle.

Luckily, some of us don’t scare easily. Especially when we can spot these posers from a mile away. Despite his many claims to unlimited resources, security detail, hacking capabilities, and “hit points”, I am here to suggest with my full chest that HE IS NOT HIM. Not even close.

I’m also curious to see how his fans and followers react. His monumental prick shtick appears to be working as his reach has meaningfully grown this year after getting platformed by other large X accounts and podcasts.

Just this week, Bunk appeared on The Shannon Joy Show, where he was described in the episode notes as “America’s favorite billionaire”. ChatGPT tells me that this podcast averages over 100,000 weekly listeners.

In this particular discussion, we were treated to a delicious moment of dissonance when Bunk said the following around the 53-minute mark:

I will say most of the people in this [billionaire] stratosphere are perfectly normal. Most of them…just live under the radar a normal life. The ones that are always jockeying for position, they’ve taken an attempt to become an alpha dude bro to an extreme level to where they have to model their behaviors according to what the [role requires]…Yes, the ones that are really obsessed about being high profile…they get away with so many things and surround themselves with so many people that enable all of their worst urges that when you have nobody telling you to maybe enact some self control and some limits…and you have unlimited resources, you start to feel invincible and you start making objectively bad [decisions]. Look I live a very normal life…I’m not in the public eye, I’m not trying to jockey for position.

I believe this is what psychologists refer to as projection.

Embarrassed by their bamboozlement, his little army of simps will likely react by having a go at me. They’ll laugh at my “obsession” with Bunk and call me a loser for having spent so much time researching this piece (about two weeks for those keeping score). But unless these people are truly braindead - which is entirely possible these days - they’ll know deep down that something is off here.

Besides, I admit this little hobby of mine is a weird one. I certainly wouldn’t be alone in that respect. Some people are cursed with abnormally high bullshit sensitivity, which combines with a joy of writing and solving puzzles to lead us to this Substack.

Others may be grown men who still play with action figures, perhaps posing them in random locations at a park near their house for a quirky little blog they maintain.

We all have our kinks, don’t we Bunk?

I reckon Bunk is honored on some level that he’s created a character interesting enough to warrant such attention. His outward response will likely tell a different story. He is easily flustered and knee-jerk defensive (another telltale sign). Any honorable person would immediately delete their account or slowly fade back into obscurity. But shamelessness is a virtue these days, and Bunk may be too emotionally invested in this persona to let any of us slow him down.

Whatever path he chooses, I’m cheering for the most entertaining one. That would involve him talking tough, making threats, and challenging me in some form. The most satisfying version would be a Space where the boys and I can dismantle his facade brick-by-brick for all the world to hear. He’d be smart to avoid such a confrontation, but pride cometh before the fall, so here’s hoping he’ll let me keep him around as a chew toy for a while. I’ll get bored eventually - I always do - but lots of fun could be had in the meantime.

Bunk isn’t used to encountering much resistance during his online escapades, masquerading as an alpha surrounded by betas. While psyching himself up in one exchange, he gave us another peek into the fantasyland he’s created for himself, where a predator stalks its weaker prey.

He’s certainly right to suggest there are real wolves on the plain.

He just ain’t one of ‘em.

Stay thirsty my friends!

---

1. The information used to form the basis of this article was obtained via Open Source Intelligence. All such information was made publicly available by the X user with handle @bonkdacarnivore (the “Subject”) or by respective affiliate organizations, current and prior, established and purported. Information sources include, but are not limited to, the Subject’s published tweets, interviews, Spaces discussions, public profiles, and affiliated websites.

   Reasonable care and diligence was undertaken by Narrative Combat (the “Publisher”) in the formulation of any speculation contained herein. The Publisher reserves the right to make its research available to the public at any time.

   None of the information contained herein relating to speculation about the Subject’s true identity should be construed as a statement of fact. Any such speculation is solely the opinion of the Publisher and whose factuality has not been independently verified.

   The Publisher contends that the Subject has, for all intents and purposes, voluntarily assumed the position of a limited-subject public figure on the basis of his claimed wealth and influence that combine with his extensive social media presence and activities, which include, but are not limited to, his contributions to public platforms such as X, GitHub, Kickstarter, and YouTube, among others.

   Given the Subject’s significant social media presence and activities, the Publisher believes that the information contained herein serves to benefit the Subject’s social media followers and the broader online community.

   For the avoidance of doubt, this article was published For Entertainment Purposes Only.

2. This piece was made possible by the support of my fellow Dudes of Diligence.