The manhunt that followed the fatal shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week turned us all into amateur sleuths. But police finally apprehended 26-year-old Luigi Mangione at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday after a customer recognized him. They found in his possession a 3D-printed gun and a short, handwritten manifesto that indicated “ill will toward corporate America,” according to police. As soon as Mangione’s name was released, seemingly everyone, myself included, dug into his online footprint: His Goodreads, his Instagram, his X accounts.
The picture that emerged confounded the preexisting theories about Thompson’s killer and his motive: that the shooter was a left-wing vigilante, or an underdog victim of the healthcare-industrial complex. Reality, it seems, is not so clear-cut.
To start, he’s a rich kid whose wealthy family owns, among other things, an assisted living facility. He attended Gilman, a tony, all-boys private school in Baltimore—and, like his victim, Mangione was valedictorian of his class. Later, he attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he became a frat boy and earned two degrees in computer science.
The rich kid to left-wing extremist pipeline is well-established—the well-heeled radicals of the Weather Underground are a prominent historical example—but there’s no evidence to suggest that Mangione was either a campus radical or a basement-dwelling loner.
A former University of Pennsylvania student, who worked with Mangione in 2018 when both were teaching assistants for an introductory-level computer science class, told The Free Press that he was shocked by Mangione’s arrest. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the student said he never heard Mangione talk about politics, and described him as “a very popular guy.”
“He was pretty normal,” the gunman’s former colleague said. “Very friendly, a nice guy who got along with everybody, and a good TA.”
“Normal” also describes Mangione’s social media presence. On X he reposted figures like health and wellness podcaster Andrew Huberman and tech writer Tim Urban; the most left-wing figure he seems to have followed on X is probably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Instagram pictures show the photogenic accused assassin shirtless and jacked, hiking and hanging out on the beach with friends. In other words, he’s a normie. Or at least that’s how he comes across online.
His Goodreads account runs the gamut from standard college freshman reading list fare (Huxley’s Brave New World, for example) to pop psychology, self-help, and books on chronic back pain (more on that in a second). The only suspicious read is Industrial Society and Its Future, otherwise known as the Unabomber Manifesto, to which Luigi gave four stars. Much has been made of this—although let’s be honest, if he were truly inspired by Ted Kaczynski, wouldn’t he have given the book five stars?
In a weird coincidence, our editorial assistant Josh Code worked with Mangione as a counselor at a summer camp for gifted students in 2019. He described him to me as a good-looking guy with whom he had only positive interactions. “He was more hassle-free and conscientious than some of the other leaders,” said Josh.
So far as red flags go, the most significant seems to be Mangione’s missing year. He apparently had back surgery in 2023, after which he appears to have changed. (On his now-suspended Twitter account, there was an X-ray of a back—presumably his—with four screws in it. According to The Baltimore Banner, it became a “time of turbulence, isolation, and pain, both physical and psychological.” Since that summer, friends say that Luigi dropped off the map, refusing to reply to messages. He bailed on a friend’s wedding, and he went to Japan sometime in February of this year, where he had dinner with Obara Jun, a top Japanese professional poker player. In the weeks before the shooting, his mother reported him missing in San Francisco. Given that Mangione’s last address was in Hawaii, police told The San Francisco Standard it wasn’t clear if Luigi had been in the city or if his mother had any reason to believe he might be.
These facts have led only to more speculation: Did his back surgery turn Mangione against the healthcare industry and insurance companies? Did he experience some kind of psychological breakdown sometime after his surgery?
Tuesday brought two more clues. As he was led to his extradition hearing yesterday, Mangione yelled to reporters: “This is completely unjust and an insult to the intelligence of the American people. This is lived experience.”
And then, a reporter published on Substack what he claims to be the suspect’s manifesto. It is short and to the point: After noting that the U.S. has the most expensive healthcare system but ranks roughly 42nd in life expectancy, he writes: “The reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit.” He concluded, “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
He never mentions his back pain but focuses on the more universal problem of the American healthcare system. In its own weird way, his little manifesto only reinforced the image of the alleged shooter as rich, intelligent, well-educated, and well-mannered.
Later on Tuesday, Mangione’s lawyer said he planned to plead not guilty, “at least to the charges in Pennsylvania,” which include forgery and weapons offenses.
None of this has hurt Mangione’s status as a hero for a disturbingly large number of people. In the immediate aftermath of Brian Thompson’s murder, the then-unnamed killer was celebrated online, as Kat Rosenfield reported last week. Now that his identity has been revealed, this dark schadenfreude has entered a new phase. People can no longer imagine that the shooter is a working-class hero avenging a sick child, or a communist revolutionary. And so the hero worship has taken a hornier tone. The accused shooter might not be the leftist people wanted, but he’s toned, tanned, and ready to kill a shared enemy—a swarthy, photogenic Chad willing to do the sort of grisly things blue-haired leftists can only post about.
This category—up to and including the blue hair—includes Julia Alekseyeva, a professor at Mangione’s alma mater. She posted a TikTok saying she’s “never been prouder to be a professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” as “Do You Hear the People Sing?,” the revolutionary anthem from the musical Les Misérables, played in the background.
Just one of the very weird responses to the weirdly normal-seeming man in custody suspected of murdering a CEO.
River Page is a reporter at The Free Press. Read his recent piece “The Smearing of Gay Republicans,” and follow him on X @river_is_nice.
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