The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last Wednesday sparked a five-day manhunt for the mysterious killer, who left behind irresistible clues like a hidden message on bullet casings and a backpack filled with Monopoly money.
Once the alleged killer was caught on Monday at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, another kind of hunt began—on social media.
Workplace productivity slowed to a crawl nationwide around 1 p.m. ET, as those who had been frantically following the story realized they could freely explore the suspect’s social media accounts and other digital breadcrumbs. Some details were revealed immediately. The alleged killer, whom TikTokers had glibly dubbed the Claims Adjuster, turned out to be 26-year-old University of Penn graduate Luigi Mangione, who studied computer science and worked as a software engineer. What only trickled out at the speed of scrolling, however, were insights into the subject’s character and motivations gleaned from his Facebook, X, Instagram, and Goodreads accounts. (As of this writing, only the X account remains available to peruse.)
The search unfolded on social media in a disjointed frenzy as more people stumbled on the big news in waves. Many folks were still just processing the alleged shooter’s very Italian name while others had moved on to analyzing Mangione’s preferred Pokemon. (It’s Breloom, the mushroom Pokemon.) Weaned on true crime mysteries, tantalized by the breadcrumb trail of bullet casings and backpacks, and fired up with Swiftie-like relentlessness, amateur social media detectives hurled themselves at any scrap of information, whether it be his LinkedIn profile or his valedictorian speech. Hoping, perhaps, for a juicy revelation that would put Mangione’s actions into fresh perspective, they picked through his sprawling body of self-disclosure and touted what turned out to be fake YouTube videos along the way.
Both the initial reaction to Thompson’s murder and the breathless excitement around Mangione’s social media speak to a desire to fit what had happened into a tidy narrative. Prior to his capture, Luigi Mangione was a mystery. He had gotten everyone’s attention; now everyone wanted to know why. The act of violence had resonated with lots of people, whether they condemned it or not, because it spoke to deep frustrations with the healthcare system, along with a general sense of powerlessness. The unknown heartthrob who allegedly committed the crime had become a blank slate onto which anyone could ascribe their preferred ideology.
Some on the left celebrated his alleged act, elevating Mangione to folk-hero status for fighting back against inhumane healthcare policies. When right-wing influencers including Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh vilified the left for doing so, though, viewers left furious comments to let the pair know their fans also identified with the killer.
But Mangione’s social media presence proved him neither a Marxist revolutionary nor a militia-affiliated libertarian. And any hopes for a master plan of great profundity, beyond the alleged murder itself, seemed to evaporate quickly. This was no longer the work of a mystery man exposing rot at the core of unfettered American capitalism; it was an Ivy League graduate who retweeted videos about Peter Thiel, praised Elon Musk, loved gaming, and wolfed down corporate-friendly airplane books like Predictably Irrational.
Indeed, the most telling revelation to spill from Mangione’s social media turned out to be his profound spinal injury. An X-ray of his back hangs in the banner of his X account, and its specter looms in some of his reading material, alongside more expected books such as The Unabomber Manifesto. Much of the other details that emerged on Mangione’s social media complicate the image of the insurance industry’s dark new nemesis, without adding any depth to it. It certainly didn’t prove, as Ted Cruz quickly claimed, that “leftism is a mental disease.”
It’s much easier to make sense of such a violent public act when the perpetrator’s ideology is in lockstep with it. The Christchurch mosque shooter in 2019, for instance, was an avowed white supremacist, as was the El Paso shooter that same year, and the Buffalo supermarket shooter in 2022. The incel behind the 2014 Isla Vista killings similarly left behind a trail of self-pitying YouTube videos for anyone looking beyond his manifesto. None of these killers resisted easy classification; their online personas match their actions. Mangione’s digital trail is more confounding.
Luigi Mangione had a back problem, which likely exposed him to the more infuriating and financially devastating aspects of the health insurance industry. It appears to be this sequence of events, rather than any ideological indoctrination, that may have driven him off course from whatever his life was going to be. Then, he disappeared. (“Nobody has heard from you in months, and apparently your family is looking for you,” reads one friend’s message on X from October.) The FBI and other authorities will comb through his search history, manifesto, his notebook, and some items the public will never see, to determine what happened next. Maybe they’ll even uncover the truth.
Until their report emerges, though, if it ever does, the most remarkable thing we can learn from Mangione’s social media is that he might not be so remarkable.
As a friend who shared a Discord group with Mangione describes him: “He just seemed like any other normal frat dude that you could see at a frat party.”
